In the 21st century, usage of online recruiting platforms is on the rise. According to a 2021 Pew Research survey, about 70% of adults in the U.S. have used the Internet to look for a job at some point. Also, a report showed that more than 80% of recruiters shared job openings on company career sites and online job search engines in 2022. Countless job openings are posted on the Internet, making collecting them manually from websites a dirty task. This post will list the best web scraping tools for job posts in 2024 to help you extract valuable information from job search websites easily.
TOP 10 Web Scraping Solutions for Extracting Job Posts
TOP 1: Octoparse
Cost: Free plan or paid plan from $75/mo
Platforms Supported: Desktop-based and browser-based
If you’re new to scraping job posts and not good at coding, Octoparse is the perfect tool for you to take the first step. As a no-coding web scraping solution, Octoparse is designed for anyone to turn pages into structured files with clicks. It can also play the role of the AI web scraping assistant with its advanced features, for instance:
- Auto-detection: This feature can automate scan the page and locate extractable job posts on the pages rather than asking you to select wanted data by hand or locating data in HTML files;
- Auto-generated workflow: A workflow on Octoparse is a flow chart that shows every action of a scraper. Octoparse visualize the scraping process for you to preview scrapers easily without asking you to write any line of code;
- Preset templates: Preset templates allow you to scrape data by only inputting several required parameters. Now Octoparse offers many templates for the most popular job search engines, like LinkedIn, Indeed, and Glassdoor. You can use these templates not only on the desktop-based software but also in your browser on the Octoparse Web Scraping Templates page.
Along with these features, Octopaese simplifies the web scraping process at every stage. You can schedule job scrapers to run termly and export scraped data automatically. Also, its strengths in IP rotation and CAPTCHA solving will improve your efficiency in pulling job posts from websites.
TOP 2: Apify
Cost: Apify platform usage from $49/mo + fee for the developers of scrapers you use
Free Plan: $5 platform free usage every month
Platforms Supported: Cloud-based
Apify is a platform for developers to build, deploy, and publish web scraping tools. There is a list of ready-made recruitment web scrapers in the Apify Store. You can apply these scrapers to extract job listings and candidate data from most job search websites, including Indeed, LinkedIn, Crunchbase, Fiverr, etc.
TOP 3: PhantomBuster
Cost: from $56/mo
Free Trials: 14 days and no credit card required
Platforms Supported: Browser-based
PhantomBuster is a web scraping solution with a focus on lead generation. Also, it’s an expert in scraping job posts and leads from LinkedIn. There is a series of preset scrapers (called Phantoms and Flows on PhantonBuster) for users to grab data from different pages on LinkedIn. Its LinkedIn Job Scraper can extract job titles, locations, descriptions, company names, posted at, etc., from LinkedIn job posts and export them in a spreadsheet.
TOP 4: Captain Data
Cost: from $999/mo with 5 seats
Free Trials: 7 days
Platforms Supported: Cloud-based
Captain Data is a no-code platform that helps businesses create a database of leads and enrich the database. It offers hundreds of ready-made scrapers, so users don’t have to build them with any maintenance or engineering headaches. On its Automations Library, you can search the keyword “Job” to get scrapers for extracting job posts from LinkedIn and Indeed.
TOP 5: Bright Data
Cost: Pay as you go or monthly subscription from $500
Free Trials: Limited by the number of scraped records
Platforms Supported: Cloud-based
Bright Data provides services for collecting public web data. It can reduce users’ development time with pre-built scrapers. Now, it offers three job scrapers to scrape job data from various job search engines, including LinkedIn, Monter, Indeed, Craigslist, etc., with built-in proxy unblocking infra.
TOP 6: ScrapeStorm
Cost: from $49.99/mo
Free Trials: free plan with limits
Platforms Supported: Desktop-based
A team of former Google crawlers built ScrapeStorm, a visual web scraping tool powered by artificial intelligence. While scraping job posts with this tool, you don’t need to write any line of code, and its visual click operation lets you to built job scrapers with only a few clicks on the page.
TOP 7: Oxylabs
Cost: From $49/mo for web scraper API
Free Trials: 7 days
Platforms Supported: Cloud-based
Scraper API is the core product of Oxylabs. While using Oxylabs web scraping API to scrape job data, you can tailor parameters to meet your needs without any extra fee and get large volumes of data from even the most complex websites. Not surprisingly, Oxylabs is equipped with features like proxy management and CAPTCHA bypass for collecting data at scale.
TOP 8: ScraperAPI
Cost: from $49/mo
Free Trials: 5000 free API credits for 7 days
Platforms Supported: Desktop-based
ScraperAPI is a simple API to scale your data collection. With this API, web scraping is simplified using artificial intelligence. It can, for instance, identify the data you need on the page. Meanwhile, you can scrape job lists from related websites and bypass any sort of anti-scraping system because of its capabilities in proxies and CAPTCHA handling.
TOP 9: ScrapingBee
Cost: from $49/mo
Free Trials: 1000 free API calls
Platforms Supported: Cloud-based
ScrapingBee is the web scraping API that can handle headless browsers and rotates proxies. Data Extraction is one of the solutions that ScrapingBee designs for getting formatted JSON data from websites. With this web scraping solution, you can extract job posts with CSS or XPath selectors.
TOP 10: Python
Besides applying no-coding tools to scrape job posts, writing a job scraping with Python is still a practical method. Wring scripts for web scraping needs skills in coding, but it can save you money thanks to Python libraries like BeautifulSoup. Here is a sample code to scrape job posts from Indeed using Python:
import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
url = 'https://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=data+scientist&limit=50'
response = requests.get(url)
soup = BeautifulSoup(response.text, 'html.parser')
jobs = soup.find_all('div', class_='jobsearch-SerpJobCard')
for job in jobs:
title = job.find('h2', class_='title').text
company = job.find('span', class_='company').text
location = job.find('div', class_='location').text
print(title)
print(company)
print(location)
print(f'Scrapped {len(jobs)} jobs!')Wrap Up
The majority of job seekers utilize the Internet as their primary tool to search for job posts, while most companies publish career opportunities online. With job scrapers, you can not only seek jobs but also research companies, submit applications, and join professional networks. Try any tools listed in this post, and we believe you can make the best use of job posts on the Internet!
