It’s necessary for a recruiter to get enough qualified recruitment leads. The way of getting abundant high-quality recruitment leads can help you build a talent pool from which you can choose a suitable person for your company when needed.
Part 1: Choose the most suitable platforms
Traditionally speaking, the recruiter would either talk to a great number of candidates or screen loads of CVs every day. If you are reaching to a wrong group of candidates, you would find the journey to the right employee long and tiring.
As people are divided into groups and communities on the Internet, recruitment could be easier if you choose the right pool. LinkedIn, Facebook and job boards such as Indeed could be effective platforms to get qualified recruitment leads.
Part 2: Collect target candidates information with web scraping
Let’s take Indeed as an example. When you target this platform, you are going to start the talent mapping, by which you can identify the character of a candidate and evaluate their capability.
Enter keywords to the searching bar directly to filter out the people you are looking for. The key of web scraping is to help you extract the selected listing information to EXCEL/CSV or other structured formats available to download to your local file.
Traditionally, we can copy and paste to get the results but it would be extremely time-consuming. Getting the data prepared in a structured form can give your easy access to the information and make the follow-up process easier. You can use Octoparse to build crawlers for this purpose, or directly turn to Octoparse data service. (If you are worried about the legal issue, please check 10 Myths of web scraping.)
Besides, recruiter should also make full use of online data to optimize their recruiting strategy.
Part 3: Monitor the competitors’ recruitment information with web scraping
Apart from scraping candidates’ information, web scraping can benefit you in another way – monitor the recruitment information of your competitors, prepare for a competitor or industry analysis.
Why should we monitor our competitor’s recruitment information?
1.Figure out the true competitors
You could have a list of the industry competitors when you search for an occupation on a recruitment platform, like glassdoor.com. Of course you will narrow down the results to those companies who are offering similar products or services as you, or offering subordinate products or services to the same group of audience.
You can scrape down those fields that were highlighted in the above picture and extract them to an Excel. Data will be well structured (below is the sample data scraped from Indeed). Then, you can pick out a target company in Excel by filtering to get a closer look at your competitor. (If you want to know how to scrape data from glassdoor.com, please refer to Scrape job data from Glassdoor)
2.Analyze the data to know the job market and competition in recruitment
Tracking your competitors’ recruitment information with web scraping, sometimes you can get a bigger picture of the job market trend in the certain industry. And if your company is going through a turnover issue, this recruitment data may get you insights of what’s going on inside and outside of your company.
In conclusion, to make the whole recruitment process easier and do a better job in human resources, we’d need a database of market vacancies and open candidates so as to know the situation and get the talent pool prepared.
Web scraping is a powerful way to really get to know the big data. You can start from using a web scraping tool as Octoparse, so as to get closer to big data and grab the value of the new oil.
