Hey guys. Ive been working hard on building my scrapper. I am able to scrape linkedin profiles. Previously I was looking for someone to do this for me but I said eff it, I will make my own and I did.
name
location
previous experience
current work
linkedin profile URL
great for recruiters. Does anyone have any use for this here?
hi CosmicSoundz and all other readers on this thread,
i'd certainly have use for such a scraper, let me know what the next step is ..
Anyway, a bit of about me and what im ultimately after:
i'd be keen in engaging someone who can scrape data from linkedin. Namely, from LinkedIn's search results page, which only gives you 10 contacts per page. I need approximately 5,000 of them, so thats 500 pages one would have to go through manually.
I am a recruiter, specializing in accounting & finance. I have database of 2,000 accounting contacts (Australia) and it mainly consists of:
- Financial Controllers;
- Finance Directors;
- CFOs;
- Finance Managers:
- Financial Accountants.
75% of my database is up to date, so 1,500 contacts are still at the same company. That means that 500 or so contacts have either left company, or changed positions within the company, or company has been liquidated, sold, bought out etc.
I wanted to be able to clean up my existing database using LinkedIn but the clear limitation is the 10 results per page. Which wouldnt be huge problem if the search results amounted to 70, leaving me only 7 pages to trawl through. However, my search generates a set of results in the order of 18,523, based on the below search criteria.
COUNTRY - Australia
TITLE - "Financial Controller" OR "Finance Director" OR "CFO" OR "Finance Manager" OR "Financial Accountant"
CURRENT & OR PAST - Current
18,523 equates to 1,853 pages. Even going through only a tenth of that would render the exercise commercially not viable.
If you were able to get 100+ results per page (ie. like an ebay), then the task would not be so laborious.
If I was to undertake such a process with search results of say 120+ contacts (12 pages), then the steps I'd take would be as follows:
1. Shrink screen to say 50% (so that i can see all 10 results. With this view, I can also select the next page without having to scroll down or up)
2. CTRL "F", search for the word "More", which will then be highlighted in yellow thus making it easier to identify.
3. Click the first instance of "More" in contact. In 90% of cases, the first "More" will relate to the contacts "current" job.
4. After having now expanded each of the 10 contacts' current job, I will then hit CTRL "A" (Select All)
5. Then CTRL "C"
6. CTRL "V" into an Excel spreadsheet (but before it goes into excel, i'll dump it into "Notepad" so that it loses its formatting, resulting in a cleaner dump into excel.
7. I then play around with that data in such a way that i'm able to get what i need, efficiently. I then do a v-lookup with the data I already have (my database). I am all set from here onwards.
I'd be very keen to see if you could help me out on this and what the process would involve
btw, I have a premium account (business plus), which i'd be more than happy for you to jump into if you wanted to have a peak around.
