Data Mining & Scraping – Where do you stop when assessing the candidates?

Data Mining:

Data mining is basically the process of automatically searching large amounts of information and data for patterns. This means that you already have the information and what you really need to do is analyze the contents to find the useful things you need. This is very different from screen scraping as screen scraping requires you to look for the data, collect it, and then you can analyze it.

Data mining also involves a lot of complicated algorithms often based on various statistical methods. This process has nothing to do with how you obtain the data. All it cares about is analyzing what is available for evaluation.

Screen Scraping:

Screen scraping is a process where you use a computer program or software to extract information from a website. This is different than crawling, searching, or mining a site because you are not indexing everything on the page – a screen scraper simply extracts precise information selected by the user. Screen scraping is a useful application when you want to do real-time, price and product comparisons, archive web pages, or acquire data sets that you want to evaluate or filter.

When you perform screen scraping, you are able to scrape data more directly and, you can automate the process if you are using the right solution. Different types of screen scraping services and solutions offer different ways of obtaining information. Some look directly at the HTML code of the webpage to grab the data while others use more advanced, visual abstraction techniques that can often avoid “breakage” errors when the web source experiences a programming or code change.

If this is any indication of the changes in the form of recruitment it is important that recruiters look into the new ways of recruitment without having to face the trouble of accessing them based on just the skill set or specific software. What if the recruiters looked into the other curricular activities and decide basis that if the employee is fit for the job or not?