The area of ​​human resources and personnel selection is increasingly related to the possibilities of extracting, collecting, selecting, and visualizing valuable data. As candidates increase their reliance on social media and recruiting websites, it is critical that recruiters benefit from web data in the hiring process.

In this article, we detail the main benefits of Web Scraping for recruiters.

Nowadays the availability of massive data from job offer sites, labor mobility indicators, or climate surveys, among others, creates an unprecedented opportunity to follow up and monitor the dynamics of the labor market.

From the point of view of the possibilities for companies, monitoring information on jobs and work skills is essential. Using Web Scraping services you are guaranteed to:

a) reduce the time spent manually extracting candidate data

b) reduce the costs of hiring a team to extract the data

c) provide near real-time data on job offers

d) enable a data-driven recruitment decision-making strategy.

All of this will help you save thousands of dollars in the search process and outperform your competition in hiring and recruiting valuable people to your organization.
Looking at the current employment landscape, an estimated 49 million people use LinkedIn to search for jobs and 87% of recruiters trust the social network to screen and communicate with potential candidates. 2 out of 3 recruiters do not have the necessary tools to understand the market and the talent pool they are recruiting. Why Web Scraping? Recruiters are making a profit from all the web crawlers to automate data extraction from recruiting websites to analyze the job market, understand candidate qualifications, and optimize the hiring process.

What benefits and opportunities do you get from Web Scraping in talent recruitment?

1. Source candidates and build a talent pool: 77% of recruiters say they are more efficient in their recruiting efforts when they have a solid understanding of the market and the talent pool they are recruiting from. With these techniques, you can mine millions of data from employee sites to create lists and databases of potential candidates, and build relationships with them before they are ready to apply.
2. Target candidates in specific geographic regions: With these techniques, you can integrate IP proxies to allow access to region-specific data. This allows recruiters to target candidates in a specific region in case the role requires employees to work on-site.
3. Compare the expertise of candidates against each other: Web Scraping allows you to collect data about candidates from specific platforms, such as their profiles on social media accounts and job websites. Web crawlers can also be programmed to extract qualifications and expertise data specific to the position, such as education or skill fields in a candidate’s profile, leveraging the extracted data to analyze candidate qualifications and estimate their match to specific positions.
4. Collect Candidate Contact Data: This involves collecting contact data from potential candidates (email addresses, social media profiles, or job website phone numbers) to allow recruiters to communicate with qualified candidates for vacant positions.
5. Learn more about salary ranges: Most recruiting websites, like Glassdoor or Salary.com, provide data on salary ranges for specific roles, years of experience, and geographic regions. Web Scraping is extremely useful for collecting a salary range for organizational job postings to help HR professionals understand candidate expectations and optimize their salaries accordingly.
6. Identify specific requirements of job postings: Recruiters can understand the education and skill requirements for roles by monitoring what their competitors are looking for in a candidate. Better descriptions of job searches are created, taking into account real postings from competing companies in the same job market.
7. Create competitive job offers: The key to Web Scraping in this field is to be able to collect information from competing websites about training opportunities, flexibility in working hours or vacation days, compensation, growth benefits in the company, etc. By understanding competitors’ offerings, recruiters can optimize their job listings and benefits packages to attract candidates and avoid losing them to the competition.