Prepare for your dream job with a LinkedIn scraping tool

Job hunting has never been easy. You may be stressed right now trying to find a job. But this article will help you get creative in this process and get the attention you seek from recruiters.

According to statistics, more than half of job seekers (56%) use professional social networks to find a job. This means that you can do your best research, connect with recruiters, and learn about companies on LinkedIn. The good news is that a dream LinkedIn job posting can become your job thanks to our robust LinkedIn web scraper. Web scraping is a proven method to prepare yourself for a new job. With Linked Helper you will be able to collect data to improve your profile, your CV, and your pitches to recruiters with motivation, market knowledge, and fire! 

Web scraping for job search: quick guide

If this is your first time hearing about LinkedIn data scraping, we hasten to assure you – it is very simple. It’s much easier than manually navigating a site that contains so many pages, manually copying texts, and studying the profiles of hundreds of target companies and recruiters.

The steps of our tested approach to job search are listed below.

#1 Download our LinkedIn scraping robot

Linked Helper is a time-tested software that helps you find leads, promote your social media account, and automate all important tasks. It can help you find a job.

Tip: You can download Linked Helper and explore all Pro features in the trial for 14 days. During this time, you can also sign up for a Sales Navigator trial for 30 days. This will give you even more opportunities to find top jobs and connect with recruiters because in Sales Navigator you can filter everyone who posted within 30 or 90 days. Since vacancies are often published in posts, the probability of finding a profile of a recruiter who is actively looking for candidates is higher. This way you will weed out the majority of inactive profiles.

#2 Preparing for a job search

Research desired jobs to copy keywords

In job postings, you can find a lot of keywords that you should include in your profile descriptions. If you study at least 6-8 descriptions in advance before applying for vacancies, this will help to update your texts without having to rack your brain. Also, through a boolean search, you can find Job alert posts in your niche around the world. Just type “Job alert AND {the name of your niche}”. For example “Job alert AND Marketing.” Read about LinkedIn boolean search: Detect qualified leads & scrape the database.

Once you find key phrases that are relevant to your experience, include them in your texts. Also, pay attention to the skills that are highlighted in the texts of the job posts. Be sure to update your Skills section with these words.

Studying the profiles of competitors

You can view and save profiles of hundreds of competitors through the “Visit and Extract” action in Linked Helper. As a result of the “Visit and Extract” campaign with competitors, you will receive a CSV document with all the descriptions from the pages, links to their profile images, and much more. Assess your strengths and adjust your CV positioning. Explore more about LinkedIn competitor analysis tool for SWOT, people & companies.

Study not only the About section, but also copy relevant skills. You can also take examples from past (relevant) descriptions. You can retrieve all the data through the software – find the instructions in the section How to download competitors’ profiles with Linked Helper. As a result of your LinkedIn data extraction, you won’t forget to mention any detail about your expertise, even if you haven’t dealt with these tasks for long.

Auto-follow recruiters to collect top tips

If you have not been looking for a job for a long time, you may not be aware of the latest trends. Or, for example, you may not know how it is customary to communicate with recruiters in a particular region. You can collect tips from experienced recruiters to speak the same language with them. Linked Helper has a useful action that will help you during the preparation stage “Follow profiles.” You can first find such recruiters using the hashtags ##jobseek, #resumetips, and #jobsearch in the People section to subscribe to them in bulk. More posts will appear in your feed (the latest posts in the industry) with useful tips and do’s and don’ts when looking for a job. The process is covered in the section How to auto-follow recruiters to monitor industry tips & trends. 

Study descriptions of target companies

Showing that you know about the company and the industry will be a plus with a prospective employer in your communication and at the interview. To beat your competitors, study the texts of organizations where you see yourself as an employee. Web scraping should help you find convincing words. You can try setting up LinkedIn job alerts for chosen companies by navigating links from the downloaded file. 

Apply key wording in your texts

As a result, having received descriptions from recruiters, competitors, and target firms, you will be armed as never before. Just use key phrases (which also describe your experience) in the text of your profile, in your CV, and in your cover letter. Stand out from your competitors. For example, do they not use numbers? You can attach screenshots showcasing the results of your work at your last job with figures. Have you noticed an impressive LinkedIn job posting related to your experience? Copy some power phrases to use in your CV too. Read our blog post SEO tips for a LinkedIn profile or business page: How to be searchable in Google.

#3 Contact recruiters in bulk

When the research is complete (you’ve updated your profile and CV texts, and studied trends from recruiters and job requirements), it’s time to take action. Linked Helper can do an amazing job instead of you doing it all manually. 

Sort using narrow social network filters. You can narrow down your search to recruiters in a specific niche. For example, in the field of tech or AI.

• Put a like on their posts. This will help get attention and generate visits to your profile. Perhaps the recruiter will add you on their own. You can also add the first auto-follow action for target recruiters.
• Take a break for a few hours. During this time, a person may have time to see your profile in their notifications and visit your profile. You can also set a pause in the software between actions in the campaign.
• Invite. You can add this action next in the campaign. In the invitation message you can briefly mention:

Hi {name}! I’m currently exploring new opportunities and would like to follow your content updates. I’m a (mention your expertise). May I know more about your relevant openings? 

Note: Based on a recent Brittney Swan post, it’s a red flag for recruiters to receive messages like “Please take a look at my resume and let me know if there’s anything open that fits.” 

If you receive a positive response and your invite is accepted, you can uncover more details about your resume in a more lengthy message.

• Message to your 1st degree connections. At this stage, you can start texting about yourself and submitting your resume! By sending messages through the software, you will be sure that only those who answered for the previous stages – after the pause you planned has passed – will receive it.

Linked Helper allows users to build a campaign that will first invite with a short message and find replies. It can smartly sort those who replied. So after the polite delay, your pre-fabricated message can then be sent only to interested talent acquisition managers. Moreover, you’ll have a convenient inbox with all chats displayed. Which makes you free from monitoring multiple chats in the social media window. 

You can also send mass free InMails to “Open” profiles. Linked Helper allows you to contact in bulk anyone not in your network that has an “Open Link” profile. You can send free InMails to recruiters sorted using the Services category search filter (this category only includes Open Link profiles). Please note that you should not start with a huge message about your skills attaching a resume in the first InMail. Explore How to send free InMails to Open profiles.

You will be able to automate this whole process in our software. 

You can test the automated job research and outreach process for free for 14 days. If you have any questions, the support service is available by email, chat on the website, and WhatsApp. We also offer a training demo webinar. Our tool will help you use the huge amount of data in the LinkedIn network for any kind of initiative you are working on.

Preparing your LinkedIn profile for job search with new descriptions

#1 How to download competitors’ profiles with Linked Helper

For example, I’m looking for a job as a Sales Manager. My goal is to study the profiles of competitors in my region to use keywords and remember to indicate the top skills in my profile.

Open your LH account. You can add more advanced features in our free Plugin Store.

Open the tab Campaign→ + icon→ Empty campaign → Create campaign.

Add one action: Workflow → Add action → Visit and extract profiles.

Add the target audience to the action. Queue → +Add.

The software will offer many options for setting a target audience. Choose Search page to scrape people profiles based on your filters. 

You can just paste a link to the results page of a search you have already done or sort people on the spot in the software. I set filters for “Sales manager” in Berlin and choose the target industry “Technology, Information and Media.”

Choose the Funnel icon → From current page.

Below you can see 133 competitors already in my campaign queue – hooray! It’s enough for my research to update profiles with fresh keywords and competitive advantages. All that’s left to do is click on Start to visit the profiles and copy the data. 

In the tab Workflow select → Start.

You will immediately see how Linked Helper starts working. On the screen below there are already 2 sales managers in my piggy bank. They are marked with a green tick as visited, and I will find all the data from their profiles later in the CRM and in the CSV table.

Do you think I could do that manually? I would have given up after the third account!

At the end of the campaign, I navigate to Lists and click on the arrow icon to download a file with all the profiles.

I receive the CSV in a couple of seconds. Thanks to simple instructions, I can open this file in Excel in three clicks.

And when I open the file, I am surprised at how much practical data is there that will help me to improve my own copy. Here are all the texts, links to their main photos, skills, headlines. 

Tip: You can use the Word Cloud tool to indicate the most popular word combinations from the pasted text. 

You may want to deepen your research based on our recommendations. So, you can start a second campaign in Linked Helper to mass follow recruiters. This will also help to get their attention on your profile. 

#2 How to auto-follow recruiters to monitor industry tips & trends

Having hundreds of LinkedIn recruiters’ profile links at hand, you can open them and check active job postings. Visiting profiles during the mass following action allows you to extract data as well, so in this step you can filter recruiters in your target industry. Also, having followed them you won’t miss any update about trends in hiring or new jobs. Influential recruiters share useful tips and checklists about job search in their posts. 

Create an Empty campaign (as we did in the section above). 

Add action→ Follow/Unfollow profiles

Pick Queue→ +Add

Filter recruiters. You may find influential experts who often talk about the industry topics by hashtags (#jobseeking, #resumetips, #jobsearch, #recruitment, #jobsearching, #jobseeker). 

When the filters are set, pick the Funnel icon → From current page. 

When the collection is complete, open Workflow → Start. 

At the end of the campaign, you will see more posts appearing in your feed with useful tips and advice about looking for a job.

Tip: You can also scrape, auto-follow, and engage with profiles of those who already work in your target companies. For example, you may investigate the CEO, digital marketers, and others of your future possible team. This will help you expand your network by adding desirable colleagues to it – before you even get the job. According to statistics, Employee referrals strongly influence the choice of a candidate. Just imagine – if a recruiter sees their current colleagues as mutual contacts with you, they may be more willing to accept your invite or respond to a message.

Linked Helper campaign example for bulk recruiter outreach 

Drafting a pitch will be as simple as ABC after your in-depth research. Mass mailing can be implemented a couple of days after scraping and preparation. You can create a separate campaign to actively reach out. For example, an “Invite and follow-up” campaign template allows you to add target recruiters to your network and send a mass welcome message to them immediately after connecting.

Filter recruiters in your industry through LinkedIn search and collect them for your outreach campaign (as we showed you above). Use the keywords “Recruiter” and “Talent Acquisition Manager.” Do not use “Hiring manager” (these are the ones who provide instructions to recruiters). 

You can create an empty campaign like this:

1. Like and comment on posts and articles.
2. Delay between actions.
3. Invite 2nd and 3rd level contacts. 
4. Filter contacts out of my network (keep 1st level only).
5. Message to 1st connections.
6. Check for replies.

It’s simple to plan piecemeal messaging for tons of target recruiters. Remember the main thing – don’t overload them with your lengthy CV. Check for responses to invites, include delays between actions, and only after that get into the details in the “Message to 1st connections” step. This is a KEY.

How does mass messaging work in Linked Helper? Very logically and gradually! But it’s best to start with active networking before you offer your services in PM. Just by adding more pre-heating actions to your funnel, you can get a dream offer. 

Benefits of sending mass messages through Linked Helper that help in finding a job:

• It’s possible to add custom variables. What does this mean? These are texts that you can write yourself in the research database on recruiters. You can manually select a phrase from the bio or headline of a user, which matches the meaning of the message. For example, I used phrases from their profile summaries in the first line of my messages. Having added this line in the table and uploaded the file again into the software, the custom variable was automatically substituted into each message. Read the manual on how changeable variables work.
• You can use customized links and images in the messages. This is possible thanks to Linked Helper’s integration with Uclic. The link text also uses a variable (it can be the name of the target company). For example, you can include a link to your CV in follow up messages. That is, the recruiter will see that you are writing a message about working in exactly THIS company.
• Replies are immediately sorted in the software. This detail reduces the time you spend reading individual chats in a window on LinkedIn. The whole time that my campaign was running, I did not go into the application at all. And every two days I checked all the answers at once, on one screen. In addition, the history of correspondence can even be downloaded.

As you can see, personalization has reached perfection. It also helps in finding a job. You can use these techniques not only for getting hired, but also in your regular work. For example, as a marketer, I continuously generate leads, look for influencers, and promote events via Linked Helper.