Jobs2Careers Scraper

Overview

Aggregate employment data from Jobs2Careers (now part of Jobcase), a US-focused job search aggregator that indexes listings from multiple sources. This actor crawls the aggregated results to compile standardized job data including titles, employers, locations, and compensation from across the American job market.

Features

• US job market aggregation from multiple sources
• Community-powered employment insights from Jobcase
• Metropolitan area and zip code filtering
• Source attribution for original job postings
• Configurable Apify residential/datacenter proxy routing with request and response analytics
• CAPTCHA detection and session rotation
• Automatic retry on failures with exponential backoff
• Deduplication of results by application URL
• Dataset validation with auto-fix capability

Supported Inputs

Field	Type	Default	Description
keyword	string	"software engineer"	Search terms for job discovery
location	string	""	Geographic filter for results
country	string	"US"	Country code for proxy routing
maxItems	integer	50	Upper limit on extracted listings
proxyEnabled	boolean	true	Toggle proxy rotation on/off
sortBy	string	"relevance"	Result ordering (relevance/date/salary)
jobType	string	""	Employment type filter
experienceLevel	string	""	Seniority level filter
datePosted	string	""	Recency filter (24h/3d/7d/14d/30d)
remoteOnly	boolean	false	Restrict to remote positions only
includeCompanyDetails	boolean	true	Fetch extra company information
includeSalary	boolean	true	Include compensation data

Output Format

Each scraped listing produces a JSON object with these fields:

{
    "jobTitle": "Senior Software Engineer",
    "companyName": "Example Corp",
    "location": "US",
    "salary": "$120,000 - $160,000",
    "jobType": "Full-time",
    "experienceLevel": "Senior",
    "postedDate": "2 days ago",
    "applyUrl": "https://www.jobs2careers.com/job/12345",
    "companyUrl": "https://www.jobs2careers.com/company/example",
    "description": "We are looking for a skilled engineer...",
    "requirements": ["JavaScript", "Node.js", "React"],
    "benefits": ["Health Insurance", "Remote Work"],
    "sourcePortal": "Jobs2Careers",
    "country": "US",
    "scrapedAt": "2025-01-15T10:30:00.000Z"
}

Proxy Handling

Proxy routing is controlled by proxyMode (auto, residential, datacenter, or none) and can be disabled with proxyEnabled: false. auto tries residential before datacenter, with country-targeted and general variants when configuring the route. It does not silently switch routes after a blocked response. RUN_SUMMARY.proxyAnalytics reports the selected route, observed proxy groups, direct/proxy request counts, HTTP status counts, and blocked responses. Apify manages proxy sessions and rotation.

Retry Logic

The crawler does not retry failed page requests in the current configuration. Failures are logged, and the optional, labelled Google Search fallback is attempted only when direct extraction returns no rows.

Anti-block Handling

The Actor does not claim to bypass CAPTCHA or access controls. Blocked responses are recorded in proxy analytics; indexed fallback records, when used, are explicitly marked as index-only.

Sample Input

{
    "keyword": "data analyst",
    "location": "US",
    "maxItems": 25,
    "proxyEnabled": true,
    "sortBy": "date",
    "remoteOnly": false
}

Sample Output

{
    "jobTitle": "Data Analyst",
    "companyName": "TechCorp International",
    "location": "US",
    "salary": "Competitive",
    "jobType": "Full-time",
    "experienceLevel": "Mid-level",
    "postedDate": "1 day ago",
    "applyUrl": "https://www.jobs2careers.com/job/example-123",
    "companyUrl": "",
    "description": "Seeking a detail-oriented data analyst to join our growing team...",
    "requirements": ["SQL", "Python", "Tableau"],
    "benefits": ["Health Insurance", "Flexible Hours"],
    "sourcePortal": "Jobs2Careers",
    "country": "US",
    "scrapedAt": "2025-01-15T14:22:00.000Z"
}

Usage

Local Development

# Install dependencies
npm install

# Set Apify token (required for proxy)
export APIFY_TOKEN=your_token_here

# Run the actor
apify run

# Validate scraped data
node dataset-validator.js

Apify Platform

# Login to Apify
apify login

# Push actor to platform
apify push

# Run from Apify Console or API

Deployment

1. Ensure all dependencies are installed: npm install
2. Authenticate with Apify: apify login
3. Deploy the actor: apify push
4. Configure input in the Apify Console
5. Schedule runs or trigger via API / webhooks

Limitations

• Visible listing text excludes inline CSS. Stable job IDs are deduplicated across pages, and repeated pages stop pagination.

• Ad links are preserved without clicking tracking redirects. Missing public descriptions are labelled listing_only; detail fields are not invented. maxItems is a ceiling, not a guaranteed count.

• Results depend on the portal's current HTML structure; layout changes may require selector updates

• Some job details (salary, benefits) may not be available for all listings

• Rate limiting by the portal may reduce throughput during high-volume scrapes

• CAPTCHA challenges may interrupt scraping on heavily protected pages

• Jobs2Careers may modify their anti-bot measures, requiring periodic updates

• Maximum items per run is capped at 1000 to prevent excessive resource usage

• Proxy costs apply when using Apify residential or datacenter proxies