Launched in 2017, Google for Jobs was created with the aim to “better connect employers and job seekers”, starting exclusively in the United States, GFJ has now been rolled out in the UK, a number of other European nations and throughout Asia as well, including within India’s huge job market.
Anyone who is familiar with the search giant will be aware that this is not the first time that Google has entered an industry they believe could be operating more efficiently. Other similar launches have included Google ‘for Education’ as well as Google Flights.
Google for Jobs is slightly different in the fact that it isn’t a job board itself. Instead, it operates in much the same way as Google’s traditional search engine, crawling job postings that already exist on the web and indexing them it in a way that allows job seekers to find roles most relevant to them, even showing commute times for positions closeby.
As part of building [Google for Jobs] we literally talked to hundreds of people. So whether you’re in community college looking for a barista job, a teacher looking to relocate across the country and want teaching jobs, or someone looking for work in construction, the product should do a great job of bringing that information to you.
Sundar Pichar – Chief Executive Officer, Google
How Does it Work?
Working with a range of partners, including LinkedIn, Monster and Glassdoor amongst others Google for Jobs works by categorising the millions of job postings that Google’s crawl robots find when naturally navigating the web.
Bringing this information together in one place, GFJ allows job seekers to find relevant job ads filtered by location, type of role, sector and date posted. By then using machine learning to automatically cluster duplicate and similar job posts in one place Google for Jobs also gives job seekers the option to apply through the site of their choice.
This might not sound like much but Google has traditionally struggled to display relevant job listings because of high turnover in job ads, the difference in job titles being used to describe similar positions, and the low amount of organic traffic these pages generally receive (particularly if the same job is posted to 4/5 different online job boards).
How Does Google for Jobs Effect Your Job Site?
At the moment 80% of all Google for Job listings will lead to an applicant applying via a job board. This is a huge missed opportunity for recruitment agencies to drive candidates through to their own site, developing long-lasting relationships in the process.
The main reason for this 80/20 split is that job boards are correctly implementing generated structured data for their job ads, while recruitment agencies are missing this vital piece of the puzzle.
Also known as Schema, Google uses this data decipher what exactly the content they’re reading is about. This helps them to show the correct information depending on the phrase being searched for.
For example for the search term “Maid in Manhatten” through identifying structured data on IMDb, Google is able to display a two and a half star review rather than a jobPosting. However for hotel jobs in New York, through correctly implemented Schema job sites with these types of roles will now appear prominently within Google for Jobs.
This is the most important advice we give when client’s ask us “How can we appear in Google for Jobs?”. The likes of LinkedIn currently use jobPosting schema far more effectively than many independent recruitment agencies.
Infact, these duplicated job postings on job boards could be wasted marketing spend in comparison to ensuring that each job post that is created on a recruitment agency website has the correct Schema implemented.