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Scrapers Tutorials

How to Scrape Google Jobs Listings With Python

Vytenis Kaubrė

2024-02-016 min read

Google Jobs is a job listing aggregator that gathers job openings from various sources all over the world into one place. If you’re endlessly surfing the web for career opportunities or want to fuel your projects with fresh job listings on a large scale, your best bet is to start web scraping Google Jobs data. It saves time and effort, and you won’t have to maintain different scrapers for individual job search sites.

Follow this step-by-step tutorial and learn how to build your own Google Jobs scraper that simultaneously scrapes Google Jobs for multiple search queries and geo-locations with Python and Oxylabs’ Google Jobs Scraper API.

Google Jobs website overview

Once you visit the Google Jobs page, you'll see that all job listings for a query are displayed on the left side. Looking at the HTML structure, you can see that each listing is enclosed in the <li> tag and collectively wrapped within the <ul> tag:

Overviewing the Google Jobs site structure

In this guide, let’s scrape Google Jobs results asynchronously and extract the following publicly available data:

Job title
Company name
Job location
Job posted via [platform]
Job listing date
Salary

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If you want to extract even more public data, such as job highlights, job description, and similar jobs, expand the code shown in this article to make additional API calls to the scraped job URLs.

1. Get a free trial and send a request

Visit the Oxylabs dashboard and create an account to claim your 1-week free trial for Google Jobs API, which is part of Oxylabs’ SERP Scraper API. It’s equipped with proxy servers, Headless Browser, Custom Parser, and other advanced features that’ll help you overcome blocks and fingerprinting. See this short guide that shows how to navigate the dashboard and get the free trial.

Install Python

If you don’t have Python installed yet, you can download it from the official Python website. This tutorial is written with Python 3.12.0, so ensure that you have a compatible version.

Send a request for testing

After creating an API user, copy and save your API user credentials, which you’ll use for authentication. Next, open your terminal and install the requests library:

pip install requests

Then run the following code that scrapes Google Jobs results and retrieves the entire HTML file:

import requests

payload = {
    "source": "google",
    "url": "https://www.google.com/search?q=developer&ibp=htl;jobs&hl=en&gl=us",
    "render": "html"
}

response = requests.post(
    "https://realtime.oxylabs.io/v1/queries",
    auth=("USERNAME", "PASSWORD"),	# Replace with your API user credentials
    json=payload
)
print(response.json())
print(response.status_code)

Once it finishes running, you should see a JSON response with HTML results and a status code of your request. If everything works correctly, the status code should be 200.

Now, let's dive into the fun part – building your very own asynchronous Google Jobs scraper.

2. Install and import libraries

For this project, let’s use the asyncio and aiohttp libraries to make asynchronous requests to the API. Additionally, the json and pandas libraries will help you deal with JSON and CSV files.

Open your terminal and run the following command to install the necessary libraries:

pip install asyncio aiohttp pandas

Then, import them into your Python file:

import asyncio, aiohttp, json, pandas as pd
from aiohttp import ClientSession, BasicAuth

3. Add your API user credentials

Create the API user credentials variable and use BasicAuth, as aiohttp requires this for authentication:

credentials = BasicAuth("USERNAME", "PASSWORD") # Replace with your API user credentials

4. Set up queries and locations

You can easily form Google Jobs URLs for different queries by manipulating the q= parameter:

https://www.google.com/search?q=developer&ibp=htl;jobs&hl=en&gl=us

This enables you to scrape job listings for as many search queries as you want. It's a good idea to visit the URLs with specific parameters using a VPN that's located in your desired country. This way, you can ensure that the URL works for that location, as Google may use different URL-forming techniques and present different SERPs that are incompatible with the CSS and XPath selectors used in this tutorial.

Note that the q=, ibp=htl;jobs, hl=, and gl= parameters are mandatory for the URL to work.

Additionally, you could set the UULE parameter for geo-location targeting yourself, but that’s unnecessary since the geo_location parameter of Google Jobs Scraper API does that by default.

URL parameters

Create the URL_parameters list to store your search queries:

URL_parameters = ["developer", "chef", "manager"]

Locations

Then, create the locations dictionary where the key refers to the country, and the value is a list of geo-location parameters. This dictionary will be used to dynamically form the API payload and localize Google Jobs results for the specified location. The two-letter country code will be used to modify the gl= parameter in the Google Jobs URL:

locations = {
    "US": ["California,United States", "Virginia,United States", "New York,United States"],
    "GB": ["United Kingdom"],
    "JP": ["Japan"]
}

Visit our documentation for more details about geo-locations.

5. Prepare the API payload with parsing instructions

Google Jobs Scraper API takes web scraping instructions from a payload dictionary, making it the most important configuration to fine-tune. The url and geo_location keys are set to None, as the scraper will pass these values dynamically for each search query and location. The "render": "html" parameter enables JavaScript rendering and returns the rendered HTML file:

payload = {
    "source": "google",
    "url": None,
    "geo_location": None,
    "user_agent_type": "desktop",
    "render": "html"
}

Next, use Custom Parser to define your own parsing logic with xPath or CSS selectors and retrieve only the data you need. Remember that you can create as many functions as you want and extract even more data points than shown in this guide. Head to this Google Jobs URL in your browser and open Developer Tools by pressing Ctrl+Shift+I (Windows) or Option + Command + I (macOS). Use Ctrl+F or Command+F to open a search bar and test selector expressions.

As mentioned previously, the job listings are within the <li> tags, which are wrapped with the <ul> tag:

Inspecting the HTML structure of Google Jobs listings

As there is more than one <ul> list on the Google Jobs page, you can form an xPath selector by specifying the div element that contains the targeted list:

//div[@class='nJXhWc']//ul/li

You can use this selector to specify the location of all job listings in the HTML file. In the payload dictionary, set the parse key to True and create the parsing_instructions parameter with the jobs function:

payload = {
    "source": "google",
    "url": None,
    "geo_location": None,
    "user_agent_type": "desktop",
    "render": "html",
    "parse": True,
    "parsing_instructions": {
        "jobs": {
            "_fns": [
                {
                    "_fn": "xpath",
                    "_args": ["//div[@class='nJXhWc']//ul/li"]
                }
            ],
        }
    }
}

Next, create the _items iterator that will loop over the jobs list and extract details for each listing:

payload = {
    "source": "google",
    "url": None,
    "geo_location": None,
    "user_agent_type": "desktop",
    "render": "html",
    "parse": True,
    "parsing_instructions": {
        "jobs": {
            "_fns": [
                {
                    "_fn": "xpath", # You can use CSS or xPath
                    "_args": ["//div[@class='nJXhWc']//ul/li"]
                }
            ],
            "_items": {
                "data_point_1": {
                    "_fns": [
                        {
                            "_fn": "selector_type",  # You can use CSS or xPath
                            "_args": ["selector"]
                        }
                    ]
                },
                "data_point_2": {
                    "_fns": [
                        {
                            "_fn": "selector_type",
                            "_args": ["selector"]
                        }
                    ]
                },
            }
        }
    }
}

For each data point, you can create a separate function within the _items iterator. Let’s see how xPath selectors should look like for each Google Jobs data point:

Job title

.//div[@class='BjJfJf PUpOsf']/text()

Company name

.//div[@class='vNEEBe']/text()

Location

.//div[@class='Qk80Jf'][1]/text()

Date

.//div[@class='PuiEXc']//span[@class='LL4CDc' and contains(@aria-label, 'Posted')]/span/text()

Salary

.//div[@class='PuiEXc']//div[@class='I2Cbhb bSuYSc']//span[@aria-hidden='true']/text()

Job posted via

.//div[@class='Qk80Jf'][2]/text()

URL

Finding the job URL selector in the HTML

.//div[@data-share-url]/@data-share-url

Please be aware that you can only access this job listing URL in your browser with an IP address from the same country used during web scraping. If you’ve used a United States proxy, make sure to use a US IP address in your browser.

In the end, you should have a payload that looks like shown below. Save it to a separate JSON file and ensure that the None and True parameter values are converted to respective JSON values: null and true:

import json

payload = {
    "source": "google",
    "url": None,
    "geo_location": None,
    "user_agent_type": "desktop",
    "render": "html",
    "parse": True,
    "parsing_instructions": {
        "jobs": {
            "_fns": [
                {
                    "_fn": "xpath",
                    "_args": ["//div[@class='nJXhWc']//ul/li"]
                }
            ],
            "_items": {
                "job_title": {
                    "_fns": [
                        {
                            "_fn": "xpath_one",
                            "_args": [".//div[@class='BjJfJf PUpOsf']/text()"]
                        }
                    ]
                },
                "company_name": {
                    "_fns": [
                        {
                            "_fn": "xpath_one",
                            "_args": [".//div[@class='vNEEBe']/text()"]
                        }
                    ]
                },
                "location": {
                    "_fns": [
                        {
                            "_fn": "xpath_one",
                            "_args": [".//div[@class='Qk80Jf'][1]/text()"]
                        }
                    ]
                },
                "date": {
                    "_fns": [
                        {
                            "_fn": "xpath_one",
                            "_args": [".//div[@class='PuiEXc']//span[@class='LL4CDc' and contains(@aria-label, 'Posted')]/span/text()"]
                        }
                    ]
                },
                "salary": {
                    "_fns": [
                        {
                            "_fn": "xpath_one",
                            "_args": [".//div[@class='PuiEXc']//div[@class='I2Cbhb bSuYSc']//span[@aria-hidden='true']/text()"]
                        }
                    ]
                },
                "posted_via": {
                    "_fns": [
                        {
                            "_fn": "xpath_one",
                            "_args": [".//div[@class='Qk80Jf'][2]/text()"]
                        }
                    ]
                },
                "URL": {
                    "_fns": [
                        {
                            "_fn": "xpath_one",
                            "_args": [".//div[@data-share-url]/@data-share-url"]
                        }
                    ]
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

with open("payload.json", "w") as f:
    json.dump(payload, f, indent=4)

This allows you to import the payload and make the scraper code much shorter:

payload = {}
with open("payload.json", "r") as f:
    payload = json.load(f)

6. Define functions

There are several ways you can integrate Oxylabs Scraper APIs, namely Realtime, Push-Pull, and Proxy endpoint. For this guide, let’s use Push-Pull, as you won’t have to keep your connection open after submitting a scraping job to the API. The API endpoint to use in this scenario is https://data.oxylabs.io/v1/queries.

You could also use another endpoint to submit batches of up to 1000 URLs or queries. Keep in mind that making this choice will require you to modify the code shown in this tutorial. Read up about batch queries in our documentation.

Submit job

Define an async function called submit_job and pass the session: ClientSession together with the payload to submit a web scraping job to the Oxylabs API using the POST method. This will return the ID number of the submitted job:

async def submit_job(session: ClientSession, payload):
    async with session.post(
        "https://data.oxylabs.io/v1/queries",
        auth=credentials,
        json=payload
    ) as response:
        return (await response.json())["id"]

Check job status

Then, create another async function that passes the job_id (this will be defined later) and returns the status of the scraping job from the response:

async def check_job_status(session: ClientSession, job_id):
    async with session.get(f"https://data.oxylabs.io/v1/queries/{job_id}", auth=credentials) as response:
        return (await response.json())["status"]

Get job results

Next, create an async function that retrieves the scraped and parsed jobs results. Note that the response is a JSON string that contains the API job details and the scraped content that you can access by parsing nested JSON properties:

async def get_job_results(session: ClientSession, job_id):
    async with session.get(f"https://data.oxylabs.io/v1/queries/{job_id}/results", auth=credentials) as response:
        return (await response.json())["results"][0]["content"]["jobs"]

Save data to a CSV file

Define another async function that saves the scraped and parsed data to a CSV file. Later on, we’ll create the four parameters that are passed to the function. As the pandas library is synchronous, you must use asyncio.to_thread() to run the df.to_csv asynchronously in a separate thread:

async def save_to_csv(job_id, query, location, results):
    print(f"Saving data for {job_id}")
    data = []
    for job in results:
        data.append({
            "Job title": job["job_title"],
            "Company name": job["company_name"],
            "Location": job["location"],
            "Date": job["date"],
            "Salary": job["salary"],
            "Posted via": job["posted_via"],
            "URL": job["URL"]
        })

    df = pd.DataFrame(data)
    filename = f"{query}_jobs_{location.replace(',', '_').replace(' ', '_')}.csv"
    await asyncio.to_thread(df.to_csv, filename, index=False)

Scrape Google Jobs

Make another async function that passes parameters to form the Google Jobs URL and the payload dynamically. Create a variable job_id and then call the submit_job function to submit the request to the API and create a while True loop by calling the check_job_status function to keep checking whether the API has finished web scraping. At the end, initiate the get_job_results and save_to_csv functions:

async def scrape_jobs(session: ClientSession, query, country_code, location):
    URL = f"https://www.google.com/search?q={query}&ibp=htl;jobs&hl=en&gl={country_code}"

    payload["url"] = URL
    payload["geo_location"] = location

    job_id = await submit_job(session, payload)

    await asyncio.sleep(15)

    print(f"Checking status for {job_id}")

    while True:
        status = await check_job_status(session, job_id)
        if status == "done":
            print(f"Job {job_id} done. Retrieving {query} jobs in {location}.")
            break
        elif status == "failed":
            print(f"Job {job_id} encountered an issue. Status: {status}")
            return
        
        await asyncio.sleep(5)

    results = await get_job_results(session, job_id)
    await save_to_csv(job_id, query, location, results)

7. Create the main() function

You’ve written most of the code, what’s left is to pull everything together by defining an async function called main() that creates an aiohttp session. It makes a list of tasks to scrape jobs for each combination of location and query and executes each task concurrently using asyncio.gather():

async def main():
    async with aiohttp.ClientSession() as session:
        tasks = []

        for country_code, location_list in locations.items():
            for location in location_list:
                for query in URL_parameters:
                    task = asyncio.ensure_future(scrape_jobs(session, query, country_code, location))
                    tasks.append(task)

        await asyncio.gather(*tasks)

Lastly, initialize the event loop and call the main() function:

if __name__ == "__main__":
    loop = asyncio.new_event_loop()
    asyncio.set_event_loop(loop)
    loop.run_until_complete(main())
    print("Completed!")

8. Run the complete code

Here’s the full Python code that scrapes Google Jobs listings for each query and location asynchronously:

import asyncio, aiohttp, json, pandas as pd
from aiohttp import ClientSession, BasicAuth


credentials = BasicAuth("USERNAME", "PASSWORD") # Replace with your API user credentials

URL_parameters = ["developer", "chef", "manager"]

locations = {
    "US": ["California,United States", "Virginia,United States", "New York,United States"],
    "GB": ["United Kingdom"],
    "JP": ["Japan"]
}

payload = {}
with open("payload.json", "r") as f:
    payload = json.load(f)

async def submit_job(session: ClientSession, payload):
    async with session.post(
        "https://data.oxylabs.io/v1/queries",
        auth=credentials,
        json=payload
    ) as response:
        return (await response.json())["id"]


async def check_job_status(session: ClientSession, job_id):
    async with session.get(f"https://data.oxylabs.io/v1/queries/{job_id}", auth=credentials) as response:
        return (await response.json())["status"]


async def get_job_results(session: ClientSession, job_id):
    async with session.get(f"https://data.oxylabs.io/v1/queries/{job_id}/results", auth=credentials) as response:
        return (await response.json())["results"][0]["content"]["jobs"]


async def save_to_csv(job_id, query, location, results):
    print(f"Saving data for {job_id}")
    data = []
    for job in results:
        data.append({
            "Job title": job["job_title"],
            "Company name": job["company_name"],
            "Location": job["location"],
            "Date": job["date"],
            "Salary": job["salary"],
            "Posted via": job["posted_via"],
            "URL": job["URL"]
        })

    df = pd.DataFrame(data)
    filename = f"{query}_jobs_{location.replace(',', '_').replace(' ', '_')}.csv"
    await asyncio.to_thread(df.to_csv, filename, index=False)


async def scrape_jobs(session: ClientSession, query, country_code, location):
    URL = f"https://www.google.com/search?q={query}&ibp=htl;jobs&hl=en&gl={country_code}"

    payload["url"] = URL
    payload["geo_location"] = location

    job_id = await submit_job(session, payload)

    await asyncio.sleep(15)

    print(f"Checking status for {job_id}")

    while True:
        status = await check_job_status(session, job_id)
        if status == "done":
            print(f"Job {job_id} done. Retrieving {query} jobs in {location}.")
            break
        elif status == "failed":
            print(f"Job {job_id} encountered an issue. Status: {status}")
            return
        
        await asyncio.sleep(5)

    results = await get_job_results(session, job_id)
    await save_to_csv(job_id, query, location, results)


async def main():
    async with aiohttp.ClientSession() as session:
        tasks = []

        for country_code, location_list in locations.items():
            for location in location_list:
                for query in URL_parameters:
                    task = asyncio.ensure_future(scrape_jobs(session, query, country_code, location))
                    tasks.append(task)

        await asyncio.gather(*tasks)


if __name__ == "__main__":
    loop = asyncio.new_event_loop()
    asyncio.set_event_loop(loop)
    loop.run_until_complete(main())
    print("Completed!")

After the scraper finishes running, you’ll see all the CSV files saved in your local directory.

Wrap up

With Oxylabs’ Google Jobs Scraper API, public data acquisition projects are fast, efficient, and effective. You can always customize and expand the code as you wish, bringing you more flexibility to achieve your goals. In case you’re looking for a general-purpose jobs scraper, check out our Jobs Scraper API.

Want to learn more? Read this quick overview of the challenges and solutions of scraping job postings.

If you're curious about scraping other Google services, see our how-to guides for scraping Scholar, Search, Images, Trends, News, Flights, Shopping, and Maps.

Frequently asked questions

Is it legal to scrape Google Jobs?

The legality of web scraping Google Jobs depends on the data you collect and how you use it. It's crucial to follow online data regulations, like privacy and copyright laws, and seek legal advice before you engage in scraping activities. Additionally, follow Google's Terms of Service and use best practices for web scraping.

To learn more, check out this article on the legal aspects of web scraping.

About the author

Vytenis Kaubrė

Junior Technical Copywriter

Vytenis Kaubrė is a Junior Technical Copywriter at Oxylabs. His love for creative writing and a growing interest in technology fuels his daily work, where he crafts technical content and web scrapers with Oxylabs’ solutions. Off duty, you might catch him working on personal projects, coding with Python, or jamming on his electric guitar.

Learn more about Vytenis Kaubrė

All information on Oxylabs Blog is provided on an "as is" basis and for informational purposes only. We make no representation and disclaim all liability with respect to your use of any information contained on Oxylabs Blog or any third-party websites that may be linked therein. Before engaging in scraping activities of any kind you should consult your legal advisors and carefully read the particular website's terms of service or receive a scraping license.