LinkedIn job posting data scraping using Python and Selenium is a guide-based
article. It will teach how to scrape the LinkedIn job posting data using Python and
libraries. You can learn the basics of scraping web data, going through web pages,
scraping data, and saving information in a digestible format.
We'll start the tutorial with an introduction to necessary python libraries,
including Pandas, Selenium, and BeautifulSoup. Then, we'll set up the
environment on how to initiate the chrome browser, set up search question
parameters, and log in to LinkedIn.
After setting up the environment, we'll go through the process of extracting job
posting data from LinkedIn. It consists of redirecting to the page to search for a
job, scrolling the page, and loading all job posts. Lastly, we'll review the primary
process of scraping relevant data for each job post.
Then the post shows the process of saving data in a Pandas DataFrame and
converting it into CSV format for further processing. Throughout the post, we
have shared the significance of ethical and responsible web data extraction. We
also motivated readers to go through the terms and services of the target website
carefully.
Scraping web data is a robust process that enables us to use automated
processes to gather data from multiple websites in a single click. Using python
libraries like BeautifulSoup, Selenium, and Pandas, you can paste scripts in editors
to see web pages, scrape data, and save it to study further in a usable format.
First, we should set up the environment using the needed Python libraries. With
selenium, we also need to parse HTML content using Beautiful Soup and data
manipulation with the help of Pandas.
Then, we should set up the search question parameters like job location and title
we wish to explore. To explain, let's take an example of search query parameters
below.
Now, let's set up the path to the executable Chromedriver. It is a particular
executable that the selenium web driver uses to regulate Chrome. You can
download the web driver from its official website and place it in your project
directory.
Then, we have to initiate the new instance of chrome driver to maximize the
window.
After allowing enough time to load the page before interacting, set the 10-second
implicit waiting time.
Now, we have to go to the LinkedIn log-in page. Fill in the email id and password,
and hit the log-in button.
After logging in to the LinkedIn account, we must wait until the page loads.
Here comes the primary step: we can scrap job posting data by looping the first
fifteen job search result pages. For this case, we are scraping only a couple of
pages.
After that, we'll use the search query parameters with the page number to set the
job search page URL.
Now, we should navigate the page of LinkedIn job search.
We should scroll the page to the bottom to load all the job posts.
Then we will parse the HTML page content having the BeautifulSoup library.
We have the option to convert the directory list to Pandas data frame.
Then, we can search the job postings page with the help of the CSS selector.
We have the option to convert the directory list to Pandas data frame.
Finally, we can save the data in the CSV file.
To run EDA on collected job posting data from LinkedIn with the help of scraping
code, we can access the Pandas library of Python and load the data from CSV files,
filter, process and clean it to use in further analysis.
Firstly, we should integrate the Pandas library and upload data from CSV files to
Pandas DataFrame.
Here, we consider 2 CSV files with LinkedIn job posting data, namely
linked_jobs_a.csv, and linked_jobs_b.csv, that we created by scraping data. We
import data from these files in separate data frames and then use function
concat() to concatenate them in the single Pandas DataFrame.
We can delete duplicate rows and missing values and use the formatting to hide
useless characters. Then, we can access different methods and pandas functions
to handle the data preprocessing. Let's take an example.
After cleaning and preprocessing the data, we can perform different visualizations
and analyses to get insights into locations and the number of job postings for
every location.
We can also generate a bar chart to observe the count of job postings for every
location.
With location data analysis, we can also analyze job titles and the name of the
company offering the job. We can collect the data for Job Titles and the Number
of job postings for every job title in a file.
We can also generate a pie diagram to observe the percentage share of job
listings for every job title.
EDA is a mandatory stage in data analytics. It helps us understand the
relationships and structured patterns of data and get analytics to get the decision-
making signal. We can use the Pandas library to analyze, clean, and preprocess
the scraped data and get valuable insights after running the web data scraping
code.