Job board software provider Madgex has launched a ‘job scraping’ service in the UK that will allow job boards to extract jobs from other job boards and put them on their own.

Speaking in London to job board owners from mainly within the publishing industry, Simon Conroy, Madgex’s chief executive, said the beauty of the job scraping service was that jobs are extracted automatically.

‘You don’t have to do anything. You decide which job sites you want to scrape from, we grab all the content, and we convert it for your job board,” he said.

“It’s all about driving traffic back to the job boards, and candidates are directed back to the original job board or employer’s site,” said Conroy. “When a job appears the source is clearly referenced and labelled.”

Conroy said that on one day last week 77% of the jobs on Washington Post’s website (one of Madgex’s clients) had been scraped from a total of 97 different job boards and employer websites.

Job scraping could be used to enhance commercial relationships between publishers and the job boards and direct employers with whom they deal, said Conroy. But it was also a great way to build completely new job boards by scraping selected vacancies.

Some employers and job boards also preferred to have their jobs automatically scraped onto sites where they want to advertise rather than post those jobs direct to job boards.

Conroy added that job scraping was legal and had been used in the US for many years.