Screenscraping p. 2: Boost your job bank

Yesterday (click here to read) we learned how Iowa Workforce Development developed a "screenscraping" tool that lifts employer job listings directly from their websites, and places them in IWD's many different job banks. Here's part two of the story, from Lori Adams, IWD's field office Bureau Chief.

Having access to this technology also created a new partnership with the Iowa Department of Economic Development, which had hosted a website for jobs paying at least $30,000 a year – SmartCareerMove.com.

IWD had long exported jobs to that site, but having the scraping technology prompted creation of a new professional jobs database that IWD provides to IDED for SmartCareerMove. If you looked at that website last spring, it had about 995 jobs on it at any one time - most of which came from IWD. Since we changed tactics, and started the "screenscraping" process, there are a lot more jobs – 3,428 as of 9 p.m. Sept. 18. Similar increases have also been noted on all of IWD’s other job pages.

Some of our current screenscraping customers include the University of Iowa, HNI/Hon Industries, Mid-American Energy, Principal Financial, Iowa State University, Iowa Department of Administrative Services, Pioneer Hi-Bred, Wellmark BlueCross/BlueShield, and Rockwell Collins. This group of employers alone accounted for 951 job opportunities on Sept. 18.

We are finalizing the IT work to start scraping other major employers like Pella Corporation, Nationwide, Google, Iowa Health Des Moines, and John Deere – all of whom have signed agreements with IWD - and are in negotiations with a number of other well-known Iowa employers. We have found that once the word gets out about this service, other employers want to get on board as well.

"It's a win-win situation," said one satisfied employer. "We used to batch our postings every Friday - 10 to 15 jobs - email these to Workforce where their staff would retype all this information into iowajobs.org. Because of size limitations, there was editing required and this time consuming effort inevitably produced occasional errors and posting delays.

"With 'scraping' our vacancies are now posted twice a week without any effort on our part. As a result, our vacancies display more accurate information and receive more time exposure."

Todd McGee, a business marketing specialist at IWD, tells me screenscraping "dramatically reduced staff time on job order maintenance, yet is robust enough to service our two large public job boards and 34 regional and niche job boards." In other words, the investment in this Web 2.0 tool was minimal, and the payoff has been big.

Want to learn more? Contact Mike Witt, the IWD Workforce Advisor who developed this tool using Screenscraper software, via email or phone (563-445-3225).

If your workforce board, one-stop or nonprofit agency is doing anything interesting like this, I'd love to hear about it and share the info with other Workforce Developments readers. Comment below, or send me an email.