With the majority of job seekers beginning their search on Google, no employer can afford to ignore the opportunity to post their openings to Google For Jobs. Its been said that up to 80% of all job searches start on the search engine.
This free job listing tool gets as many as 150 million searches each month. And that’s just in the U.S. Indeed, which is the most heavily trafficked job board in the world, counts about 250 million monthly job searchers worldwide.
The numbers alone are a reason for employers to submit their jobs to Google. Casting a wide net in this competitive hiring environment only increases the chances of attracting candidates. The phrase ‘jobs near me’ is actually of the most popular searches on Google.
But more than just numbers, Google’s emphasis on user experience and its search prowess make it simple for job seekers to zero in on exactly the jobs they want. That benefits companies because the candidates that apply have targeted the job and the company with a precision few other job boards can match.
When Google For Jobs was launched in 2017, Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai said the goal was to “better connect employers and job seekers.” To that end, Google added search filters to so finely tune a search that job seekers can narrow down openings by the length of the commute. A search that might start as generically as “retail jobs near me” can be filtered for only certain companies, location, title, skills, date of the posting, and whether the job is 2 miles, 15 miles or anywhere.
That level of filtering and search matching, unrivaled by most commercial job sites, makes Google For Jobs as useful for employers with only a few jobs as for large enterprises with thousands of openings a month. So valuable is Google for Jobs that with the exception of Indeed, job boards and staffing companies send their listings to Google.
To make searching even more job seeker friendly, Google For Jobs is prioritizing listings where job seekers go directly to an application without an intermediate step to register. In announcing its “directApply” feature, Google also said it won’t allow content from career sites that spam their pages with obstructive text and images, excessive and distracting ads, or content that doesn’t add any value to the job posting or is grammatically incorrect. ATS vendors should take note because Google may penalize you after October 1st 2021 for not letting candidates apply immediately rather than forcing them to login or go through other hoops before they can submit a resume.
Participating in Google For Jobs requires an employer or other contributor to code their job postings according to Google’s specific formatting requirements before uploading them. Complying with this schema can be complicated. However, most of the leading applicant tracking systems now do this automatically.
Job boards also do the same, hoping to benefit from the additional job seeker traffic Google For Jobs sends.
As attractive as Google For Jobs is, the tricky part is getting a job to place high up in the search results. That’s where search engine optimization is important and Google’s famed algorithms come in. They take into account a number of factors including how many of the schema’s properties are included and how specific the posting is. The ability for a candidate to directly apply for the job will rank a job much higher than a similar one without that capability.
Even with a high ranking in the search results, there’s no guarantee an employer’s career site will be listed among the places a candidate can chose to go to apply.
Since it’s common for a job posting to be distributed to several sites all of which may send it to Google, those from sites that best comply with the editorial content guidance are most likely to be listed as an application destination. That means Google won’t just look at the job posting, but will also weigh the value of each site submitting a job.
Employers who want to benefit from the job seeker traffic and the visibility Google For Jobs can provide should do whatever housecleaning is needed to comply with the editorial guidance.
Improving the candidate experience on your site not only will aid your chances of ranking high up on Google For Jobs, but it will make you a more attractive employer to candidates no matter how they get to you.
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John Zappe Contributed
