When confronted with millions of job posts, data scraping API saves time not only for eager candidates in finding their dream jobs but also for businesses and organizations in analyzing the competitive market.

Job scraping tools collect data to observe market trends, monitor job listings from competitors, and discover new job post schemes and trends.

Let’s explore how a job scraping API works, what data it offers, and ways to incorporate this API in rising and successful businesses.

In this article

What is a Job Scraper API?

Essentially, a job scraping API is a tool that grants companies quick access to specific publicly available job data on demand. For a deeper understanding of this system, let’s break down what job scraping is and why we use an API.

Job scraping is an automated extraction of job postings across the whole web. How does it work? A user inputs a URL into a scraper tool, and the tool converts the entire website into data. The data can then be downloaded in structured formats (CSV, JSON, HTML) suitable for spreadsheets and databases.

API (application programming interface) is a collection of systems, functions, and procedures that allows for two or more applications to communicate with each other. Since job scraping takes place in various software, an API eliminates the need for converting all data, as it swiftly scrapes and displays all data in a structured way in a selected format. A recent study showed that a large percentage, 90% of developers, use APIs in some capacity.

What data do job scrapers collect?

Job scraping occurs on hundreds of thousands, even millions, of websites with job posts. Some of the most common fields of data extracted from these job postings are:

Job title
Company hiring
Job location
Position description
Job type (full-time, part-time, in-office, remote)
Salary range
Employment requirements

All of this data can be manually found on LinkedIn, company career pages, job boards, applicant tracking systems, or other small niche job boards. Career pages are specific to companies and contain job posts relevant to those companies.

Job boards serve as a great place to find job postings across many companies, locations, and professions. Applicant tracking systems allow scraping company job postings without having to visit each career page separately.

While all of these sources are great on their own, there is a much easier and better solution in the form of job scraping API, which contains all of the data from the sources listed above in one place and in an easily readable structured form. A study showed that a hiring cycle can be 60% shorter with an optimized recruitment process, that type of optimization can be reached with a job scraping API.

How businesses can use job scraping data

63% of hiring managers and talent specialists claim that AI such as job scraping API has positively changed how recruiting is controlled at their company. Let’s look at some of the positive changes and benefits companies can expect from job scraping API:

Determine suitable salaries

With access to data about job postings, you can analyze what other companies are offering, starting from job age requirements up to a detailed salary description. While job requirements are distinct for every company, a salary should stay competitive. The salary you set should meet the job requirements and stay in a set range that’s ideal for the market.

Understand employee attitude 

Job posting sites don’t stop at job postings, many of them also include employee reviews of companies. Job seekers can read these reviews and understand the social environment or company culture before applying for the job.

Beyond warning job seekers about bad bosses, these reviews are informative for the company itself. By scraping company review data, organizations have a wider view of their bad qualities and their overall work culture.

Stay ahead of the competition

Whatever business process it is, companies need to stay competitive in all routes, including job posting. Job requirements, company policies, salaries, and job type trends shift constantly, therefore staying updated is key. With APIs, you get the freshest job posting data, which will help you refresh exciting jobs and stay on top of trends.

Wrapping up

The online job repository is constantly expanding, and so are the technologies around it. More and more companies are discovering new ways to harness job data and use it so it benefits their business. The ultimate solution now is job scraping API, it’s a simple way to leverage all job listings data in one structured database.