Webflow is a super powerful no-code tool for building websites, but how easy would it be to turn it into a job board, that updates automatically, all without writing code?
Pretty easy it turns out. By combining Simplescraper (a tool that turns websites into APIs), Parabola (a tool that transforms data) and Webflow we can get a job board up and running in no time.
In this guide we'll walk through scraping data from the popular jobs website Indeed.com and listing the jobs on a webflow website. Once we set up the workflow, the website will list the latest jobs automatically each day.
No CSV import, no code, no hassle—just a stream of jobs that can act as the foundation for building your very own niche job board. Let's get started!
One Simplescraper account - to get job data from websites of our choice
One Parabola account - to connect the job data to Webflow
One Webflow account - to host and display your job board website
About 20 minutes of your time
And here's how our finished product will look: https://simplescraperjobs.webflow.io/
On to the first step.
Webflow is a service that allows you to create websites without code
Although it seems like this step should come later, we'll do this first so that Parabola knows where in Webflow to send the jobs data when we connect the two apps together.
So, in Webflow, create a new project or edit an existing project and add a collection that will store our jobs. Within the collection, name the fields that we want to create. As we're creating a job board we'll add job title, job description and company fields. We'll map the data from Simplescraper to these fields in a later step.
You can preview the Webflow website we're using here to see how it's designed. If you're new to creating collections in Webflow then check out this intro guide or go deeper with this course which covers collections in detail.
Now that we've created a collection to store our data in Webflow, let's populate it with jobs.
Simplescraper is a service that allows you to turn any website into structured data and query that data like an API.
This means that we can request live data from any website - like a jobs website - on demand.
Sign up at simplescraper.io and then navigate to the dashboard and click 'Recipe store' in the sidebar. Scroll down and select the Indeed jobs template and then click 'use in new recipe'.
The default URL to be scraped is https://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=javascript&sort=date however you can change the query to extract different types of jobs. For example try https://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=marketing&sort=date to scrape marketing jobs.
Once we've selected the URL that we want to use, save the recipe and click run. Simplescraper will scrape the jobs from Indeed.com and display the results after a few seconds.
On the results page click on the API tab and copy the URL. If we navigate to that URL we'll see our job data. And if we add "&run_now=true" to the end of the URL, Simplescraper will scrape Indeed.com in realtime and return fresh data. We'll use this in the next step.
Tip: If you'd rather extract jobs from websites other than Indeed.com then install the Simplescraper extension which allows you to extract data from any website on the web.
Parabola is a service that allows you to import data, transform it, and export it to a destination of your choice
In Parabola create a new flow and search for API import and add that step to our flow. Double click the step and do the following:
Click 'show updated results' and we should see the job listings appear after a few seconds. Easy.
Now let's add a second step to send the data to Webflow. Search for Webflow CMS export and add that step to our flow. Double click the step and do the following:
Click 'show updated results' to confirm that the data looks correct and then publish the flow and click run.
And that's it - the jobs have passed from Simplescraper, through Parabola, and out to Webflow. On to the next step.
If all went smoothly, our job data should be sitting in Webflow's CMS waiting to be displayed. To display the data on our webpage, do the following:
And we're done. In three steps and about 20 minutes we've created an auto-updating job board that looks something like this.
With the basics of scraping data into Webflow mastered, why stop at job boards? Try scraping Airbnb listings, local events, stock prices, sports results etc. to create unique content for personal use, for your team, or to build an audience around. With a little imagination, a dash of scraping, and some dragging and dropping, anything's possible.
If you have questions about any part of this guide, find us on Twitter and on chat at simplescraper.io.
Happy building!