Let’s kick this off with some audience participation. Head over to Google and search for “jobs near me”....
As well as the typical list of links and ads from the big job boards and aggregators, you should be met with a rich interactive ‘search vertical’, that looks a bit like this:
That’s Google’s new recruitment tool, Google jobs. A feature that clusters live vacancies from a wide range of job boards, careers site and ATS systems into one handy place. After months of testing in the USA, Spain and parts of Africa following it’s unveiling last year, it’s officially landed in the UK this week, and it’s set to shake up the way we search for jobs...
Tapping into Google’s core capabilities, it uses machine learning to recognise when users are searching for jobs, clustering the freshest and most relevant roles based on a user's location in a rich ‘search vertical’ modal. Job seekers can then search and organise these opportunities based on a number of factors, such as skill level and commute time, all within the Google window… Gone are the days of having multiple tabs and searches on the go at once!
Whilst it’s brilliant news for job seekers, it sounds like it could be the end of job boards and aggregators as we know them, right? Well rather than taking on the kingpins of job search, Google have partnered with the likes of Reed, Guardian Jobs, Totaljobs, LinkedIn and Glassdoor (and other smaller specialist job boards) to bring the service to life.
It’s a widely known truth that most job searches start in Google. So this service will allow job seekers to search, explore and refine a range of roles, from a wide number of sources, all within Google - only jumping into job boards and careers sites once they’re engaged, intrested and actively seeking further information. This means traffic from job ads is likely to be much more meaningful for employers, and it means potential candidates are accessing the most meaningful and relevant information, exactly when they want it. A great candidate experience, right from the off.
To make the most of Google jobs, ensuring your job ads are getting the furthest reach and your talent brand is getting as much exposure as possible, an obvious first port of call would be focusing media spend on platforms that are partnered with Google jobs. However feeds aren’t just being pulled from job boards…
The platform is also generating content from from existing websites that host individual job ads and descriptions, typically being ATS systems. So those ATS’s and businesses that are currently structuring data and content in a way Google can easily understand will already be getting an instant leg up when it comes to discoverability.
So you’re probably wondering what you can do to get ahead of the pack and make the most of this new feature, right?
Well for starters, we’ve pulled together a handy little tool for you to check if you already have the code in place or not for Google jobs to pull information through.
Give it a quick try here.
If the answers a no, or things aren't quite pulling through the way you want them to, here’s a few suggestions to get you up to speed:
- If you display jobs on your own website, you will need to amend the html of your job detail pages to include a special code that Google can pick up. We’d be happy to help you out with this, or you can point your web developers to this documentation from Google.
- Within the html of the job description page, you can hide special “JobPosting” schema markup to identify things like the job title, the job description and the location in a standardised way that google can recognise and understand. If your company logo isn’t pulling through for example, this is where you need to focus your attention. Just give us a call, or point your developers to the above link, if you could use a hand.
- If you list jobs via a 3rd party ATS, many of them have already added or are adding the special code to include your jobs in Google jobs - so give our tool a try, or drop your provider a line to see if this includes you and find out what they can do to get it setup if you aren't already.
- And finally, just note that jobs won’t start appear in Google jobs as soon as you make any of these changes - they still rely on Google crawling your website to find them, so expect at least a couple of days before the job appears in Google.
We’ll be keeping a close eye on how Google jobs progresses over the next few weeks, so watch this space for any news and updates.
And in the meantime, we’ll be on the end of the phone if there’s anything we can help you with!
