Hijacked! The Problem with Job Scraping

A reader wrote to me about the following problem she was encountering with scraped jobs off her company website;

Do you have any tips on getting old, filled job posts off the internet?  Job Boards scrape jobs  and it’s frustrating when you get a phone call or resume from someone who saw a job that’s been filled for months on a job board.

I reached out to a couple of popular job aggregators to get their thought on this vexing issue many employers face. Adzuna offered the following;

Unfortunately for this person, the responsibility ultimately falls with the job board themselves to be diligent and responsible and to refresh their feed and scrapes regularly. What we are seeing is that more and more job sites are adopting a consistent schema for job ads. This means that we're seeing an increasing number of job ads using the 'valid from - valid to' + 'expiry date' markup. So expired ads can be quickly identified by 3rd party sites through scripts and automation. This is not a silver bullet, but it suggests that if you markup your jobs in the same way, this will happen less often.

The other thing is to be vigilant. We deal with people taking jobs off Adzuna's site and marking it with the wrong company on a regular basis, so start with politely informing them that they've done this and ask them to refresh their feed and scrapes. If it keeps happening, or you get no response, you can take more serious action. It's unlikely that any job board is keeping expired ads on their site deliberately as it's a terrible candidate experience. 

~Andrew Hunter, Adzuna

As he says you can try contacting the job board in question but those efforts may not always payoff. A lag has always existed in job listings after they have been distributed across multiple providers. My friends over at Talent.com also had some thoughts.

Their Director of Client Services Robert Boersma told me over email;

• First it is important to understand the type of website in which this content is being displayed – is it a job board or an aggregator? Job boards like Monster or CareerBuilder do durational based postings – think of it like Craigslist for jobs. Aggregators (like Indeed or Talent.com) are search engines, and are likely the ones scraping your website and pulling job content. Very useful for getting free, organic candidate flow, but sometimes can lead to a delay time in jobs that are filled still being displayed. If this is a trend you see, reach out directly to those websites to explore your options with them.

• If your ATS system enables you to generate an XML feed of your job content, you can provide this feed to job search websites, which will put the content that gets indexed to these sites into your control. This will also help you build a direct relationship with these sites and have better control of your content that is scraped online.

• Understand that job content is often shared between both job boards and job aggregators (often called “cross-posting”, or “backfilling”). This process relies on refresh rates varying between 1-12 hours. There can be scenarios where a job, or set of jobs falls between the cracks in this process and jobs can stay live for far too long outside this window.

• Using a plugin like “link redirect trace” can help you understand this job sharing process, and find the root scrape of your jobs – and therefore where to address your request to remove expired jobs.

• Ultimately, the online job search world is one where hundreds of websites are continuously scraping and sharing jobs in order to give candidates the best possible chance of finding your roles, wherever they’re looking for work. Typically this works well and the online world will follow closely behind your ATS as jobs are added and removed, but technical errors can happen (as we all know too well). The best way to prevent expired jobs is to have a contact within websites that are indexing you, and to control the content that is shared via an XML feed, leaving less to interpretation from the indexation crawler of a job search website.

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One other tip I might add is to sign up for email alerts on Google for Jobs. For instance if you google a phrase like “company name + jobs” you can sign up for alters via the tab on the right. At least this way you can keep track of where your jobs are appearing online at any one time.

Interesting reads from the HR tech landscape

Here's a short list of some news and views coming from the HR tech landscape.

THE FUTURE OF DICE: my pal Jeff Dickey Chasins writes about his former employer, the job board Dice.com and its future. Its an interesting look at whats happening to them and the "big" job sites in the market. Check out my comment at the end.

Read Full Article

TOO MANY RECRUITING TOOLS? Tim Sackett says we are forcing too many tools onto recruiters. There is certainly truth to this statement.

"We start out with a bunch of recruiters and some phones. That’s not enough we need to add some other stuff, these recruiters need tools! So, we give them email and an ATS. Then comes the job boards, postings, InMails, etc. Might as well automate background checks and references. We really need to fill the pipeline, here comes sourcing tech!

Wish we had a way to get our messages out to candidates more effectively! CRM, branding technology, data analytics, SMS messaging, etc. Just keep adding more tools! That’ll a fix it Except it doesn’t!"

Read Full Article

WHATS NEXT IN HR TECH? Too early to tell says analyst Josh Bersin. It is impossible to predict but he does have a few thoughts. "Next year I anticipate seeing more vendors here discussing wellness and work/life balance. From our data we know 45% of millennials consider a healthy work/life balance to be their top priority, so we can expect more tools based around this."

Bersin also anticipated a rise in rapid feedback software. "We used to operate a system that offered feedback once a year at appraisals. But in reality this is way too little feedback. We can expect to see a rise in tools that offer fast feedback on everything the employee does."

Read Full Article

RecTech Headlines for August

Here's your summer fix for all thats new in recruiting technology land.

Upsider is a new sales rep matching tool for employers and candidates. Link via ERE.

FOR SALE:  Profitable Midwest based local job board is up for sale. View details.

HourlyNerd, the Boston-based online freelancer marketplace startup that recently landed $22 million in venture funding from investors including Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, announced that it has rebranded to “Catalant.” The name is a combination of the words “catalyst,” “brilliant,” and “talent,” according to a release. Link.

Workday acquires Platfora to help it improv its analytics. Link.

Drafted launched the second version of its app earlier this year, letting people browse through job listings, see if they have any mutual connections to a job they want and request an intro to the hiring manager through any mutual connections. Sources say they are planning to open it up to more companies outside of Massachusetts this fall.

The startup has raised $2.5 million so far from several investors, including General Catalyst Partners, Accel Partners, Paul English’s Blade startup accelerator and Boston Syndicates. It has six employees. Link.

Mya, an AI platform from FirstJob, aims to make sure no applicant goes into the void—and no recruiter has to wade through a sea of resumes. Interesting to see how these guys have pivoted and are trying to take advantage of the “chatbot gold rush” Link.

Snagajob says they are looking for more stuff to acquire. If your tool targets hourly employees you might want to give them a call. Link.

Company in Denmark creates a Job title extractor. Check it out https://goodwin.relinklabs.com

Indeed launches JobSpotter app for retail businesses. Designed for people to take pics of we’re hiring signs in store windows. Link.

AfterCollege buys Cross-Post and is making it part of Recruitology, a service that launched for employers earlier in the year. Here is a link to the press release:http://www.prweb.com/releases/2016/07/prweb13533921.htm

Bumble Bizz app: the popular swipe-based dating app understands this, so is launching a feature to help users temporarily set aside dreams of love so they can match with someone who may help them advance their career. Link.

CornerJob only closed its $10 million Series A in February. But the Barcelona-based jobs marketplace, one of several which focuses on low-skill, high-turnover recruitment via a smartphone messaging app, is now announcing a $25 million Series B funding round — meaning it’s already raised a total of $35M in less than a year. Link.