Attracting top talent is essential for the success and growth of a company. The majority of employers will agree that finding the best talent is just as hard as it is important. This is why, rather than waiting for the right candidate to magically fall into your lap, it's time for employers to turn towards the untapped power of web scraped recruitment data.

In this blog, I try to identify the problems that the talent acquisition industry is facing and how to best solve them.

Is there a skills shortage in your location?

Maybe we don’t really have a skills shortage, it's more that we are looking for the right people in the wrong location.

For many roles, you don’t need to be in a specific location in order to carry out your job. Software developers, for example, can carry out their job responsibilities from anywhere as long as they have access to the necessary hardware and tools to do the job. The same can be said for many other job roles. Yet many companies will continue to search for the same type of talent as they always have - people who live (or are willing to live) near the “office” and who work 5 days a week.

To combat this problem more and more companies are adapting to the remote/smart working distributed workforce model. We, at Zyte (formerly Scrapinghub), are a remote-first company. We focus on hiring the right talent and allow people to work from where they do their best work! Web scraping is a great option to help recruitment teams to educate themselves on understanding and searching for great candidates outside of their immediate network or region.

Web scraping involves using software to extract data from job listings at scale, and it can be an effective way to gather information on potential candidates from a wide range of sources. Web scraping software allows users to scrape job listings from various online sources, including job boards, social media platforms, and company career pages. With the job scraper, recruitment teams can easily gather data on job titles, qualifications, and other relevant information for potential candidates.

In this way recruitment teams can gain valuable insights into the job market and identify promising candidates they may have otherwise missed. Additionally, web scraping can help to streamline the recruitment process and save time by automating the data collection and organization process.

Attracting talent and employer branding

When we think about the “great” companies to work for it is also reasonable to suggest that they are “great” at attracting talent. Their recruitment process will likely screen for the “best” talent that they can identify. Also, they are really great at making sure people want to work for their organization.

A strong Employer Brand is vital to an organization’s ability to attract talent but what does that mean in reality?

As an organization, you must ensure that when a prospective candidate considers working for your organization, they get a positive experience right from the moment they start researching about the company.

1. The data that a candidate consumes while researching about your company before the application process should give them a positive experience.
2. The candidate then needs to have a positive experience throughout the recruitment process.
3. Once that candidate is offered a position, he/she then needs to have a positive onboarding experience.
4. Finally and most importantly, the candidate needs to have a great employee experience.

If all of this is taken care of, you are in a good place. But there is still plenty more to do.

As Talent Acquisition professionals, we not only have to ensure that we position ourselves as an Employer of Choice, but also be considerate of the various channels or platforms that we use when sourcing Talent and the language that we use when promoting our roles in these channels.

Beyond the job description in your advertising

In the job description make sure that you communicate the most important points:

• Company Culture
• Company Vision and Strategy

These points need to be communicated in a way that captures the imagination and naturally attracts candidates who are aligned with our culture and vision. Using recruitment data extracted from the web you can get insights into the best job titles for your positions, job, and Values keyword research to make sure your Job Description always appears No 1 in all search queries.

Make it easy to apply

A lengthy application form can deter candidates from applying, especially in a market where candidates have plenty of choices and it might be just easier to apply elsewhere. So keep it simple and have a good qualifying process in place that allows you to determine the best candidates. Using web data extraction you can get easy access to competitors or market application forms or processes giving you an edge on hiring trends by location.

Respond quickly

How responsive are you to those candidates that do reply? Every company must aspire to be better at this - ourselves included! This is our biggest concern. After all the hard work we go through to put ourselves in a position to attract talent, we can leave ourselves down badly here by not responding as efficiently as we should. Talent Acquisition teams need to move quickly to get candidates on board, so looking at your Time to Hire KPI is always good, but do not ignore the fact that while you are moving candidates successfully through a process, you should also be giving timely feedback to candidates who are not progressing.

Where to advertise your open roles

We use many job boards and social platforms to advertise our open positions. Some of them include Glassdoor, Twitter, StackOverflow, Github, etc.

Glassdoor - TripAdvisor for companies

Ensure you engage with your Glassdoor profile it is where employees and candidates are talking about their experiences with your company. If your employer rating is 2 out of 5 then you have some work to do, but likewise, if your employer rating is 4 out of 5 you still have work on your hands - you need to stay on top of it and ensure that you actively participate.

Developer platforms - don’t spam them with job adverts

StackOverflow, Github, and other development forums should be treated with care. These are typically pure tech forums for those actively discussing various topics in the respective communities. They do not take kindly to unwarranted recruitment traffic. But there are dedicated channels within these spaces that you can engage with so careful consideration is needed.

Social channels - Build the brand and they will come!

Be mindful of whether social channels could give you an edge - Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, YouTube. These are all platforms where you can produce content for your future hires and thus it would be a mistake to totally ignore them. You need to share interesting and shareable content - make it intriguing. If you can build a brand on these platforms, the people you are looking for will find you. Work with your Marketing teams on adapting some of their materials for your recruitment needs.

Working with recruitment agencies

A great source for talent - but the same rules apply! If you are working with recruitment agencies, then ensure that you are working with recruitment partners that know your business and are equally invested in representing your company and brand in a positive way. They need to be an extended version of you and your Talent Acquisition team.

Your recruitment partners can be the first port of call with your candidate, and with the help of recruitment agency software, they will manage the candidate experience through this process. Therefore, they need to be fully briefed on the job role and the company specifics. Recruitment agencies source and influence talent - so invest time in identifying some key recruitment suppliers that will best represent your brand and work with them as you would somebody on your team.

The future of recruitment

Companies will need to shift their mindset from “War for Talent '' to “Seduction of Talent”.

The future of hiring amazing talent is going to be revolutionized by automation and talent pooling tools, and new candidate engagement methodologies. With web extracted recruitment data, you have a source of quality data for job listings, candidate sourcing, salary levels, market insight, or competitive intelligence enabling you to make better hiring decisions in an increasingly competitive labor market.

Recruiters will be able to find a better fit for the company from the exhaustive list of web extracted candidate data. Their focus will then be on relationship building and ensuring that the candidates get a great experience throughout the recruitment process.

The workforce today is being disrupted, and as always, the companies who adapt and pivot will be the ones that will succeed. Let our experts handle the data acquisition so that you can focus on talent acquisition. Just tell us what data you need.