Help! I need a developer's opinion (Travel Nurse RN)
For the last few months, I've been building a community/website for travel nurses (www.travelnursern.com). Recently, we've expanded to include a job board that pulls in jobs from the largest healthcare staffing companies. Everything has gone great so far, but the process is very manual for now.
It looks like this:
- Scrape jobs weekly with Import.io
- Combine and clean up exported spreadsheets in Google docs
- Upload spreadsheets to Wordpress website using All Import plugin
- All Import Plugin creates all the new jobs at once.
In order for this to scale to something much larger, I know that I'll need to try and automate this process so the jobs can update more regularly (daily, hourly). But I've gotten as far as my experience as a marketer can take me. I don't know where to go from here. I think the answer may involve cron jobs and APIs, but I'm not entirely sure how either of those work. Eventually, we'd like to turn this job board and other features into a full-fledged mobile app.
For now, how do I get to the next step?
Do I hire a developer?
If yes, who should I look for?
Is there an easy way for me to scale this?
You should check out something like Zapier (https://zapier.com).
You can build flows that perform a still codeless version of the process you described. Perhaps stuff like the 'cleaning up' part might be a bit more complex if it's not easily definable, but that would also introduce difficulties for a developer.
There are plenty of options for automating this. Like ohad said, you may not be at the point where you need to hire a developer to improve it. It is likely that you'd need to wrangle it into a nicer format for consumption by a mobile application, if you're going that route.
Personally, I'm a big fan of scrapy.
Hey.
Saw your post. I'm currently scraping ~400-500 of the largest colleges in the US market.
Depending on the target site, scraping's not bad. (Someone mentioned scrapy -- a python scraping framework with twisted)
If you can post the target sites I (or someone else) can take a look to see how easy/complex scraping would be on a "daily" basis.
Assuming you have little/no cash, what's your skillset for barter/trade!
Post your email/contact if you want to talk on this!!
-bruce
Thanks for reply. Currently, we're just scraping some of the larger temporary nurse staffing job boards:
https://www.nursesrx.com/job-search/
https://www.amncareers.com/jobs/p-nursing-k-l-/
http://www.fastaff.com/travel-nursing-jobs
But there are regional companies like these in every single state each with their own job board. Eventually, we'd like to offer this as a paid service to those smaller companies. So the format of each job board is a little different.
As far as skills for barter / trade. I'm currently employed as a growth marketer for a "Growth As A Service" Agency working primarily with startups. Before that, I worked as a full-time copywriter for an advertising agency. So I'm fairly comfortable with any aspect of copywriting or funnel optimization.
Hope that helps. Thanks again for the help!
Good start. Get a python/django developer to get this done for you.
Essentially , he builds your website and host it preferrable on cloud and automate the process. The thing with scraping and automation is that you will from time to time need an eye on the scripts as the data source will likely be making changes as a business too.
Any idea what something like this might cost? In my experience with Upwork, fiverr, etc. there's varying degrees of talent. But to get something functional that looked halfway decent, what should I expect to pay?
Honestly, I don't know very much good python/django devs on fiverr,upwork or freelancer. 2 years ago I needed extran hands on a django project and my experience with the candidates was awful. I ended up going alone. that said; I would expect a good deal to cost you between $800 - $1200
Hi thelefty07, I consider myself an automation freak. I have built a few automated scraping/processing/email like workflow/tools for my personal projects. Lets discuss this further. Thanks.
Thank you for the offer. I'm very interested in discussing further. What's the best way to contact you?
I have updated my profile BIO with my email. You can email me there. Thanks.
what's your website URL?
jobs.travelnursern.com
Thanks for reply, you should put that url in your description :D
Added! Thanks for the reminder.
How much are you paying for this? If you're only scraping from ~20 job sites and they're mostly similar, I'd expect that you could hire a developer to do write custom scraping for you for a few hundred dollars.
Check this https://www.indiehackers.com/forum/post/-KlaJZq0j_GybJiDpYfO