Google for Jobs Launches in the UK: Here’s what Recruiters need to know

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ll have heard all the hype about Google for Jobs hitting the US, Spain and parts of Africa in 2017. After much anticipation, Google’s latest feature has launched in the UK as of 17th July 2018. The new functionality allows job seekers to search for jobs by title and location, and filter the results depending on their preferences. This is big news for the recruitment industry, providing direct competition for job boards and changing the way candidates search for jobs.

What impact will this have on candidates and recruiters?

First thing first, it’s important to clarify that Google for Jobs is not a job board that you can post jobs to. Google says that it’s ‘not out to kill job sites like Reed and Indeed’, but aims to make it easier for job seekers to find relevant roles. The benefits are twofold: for candidates, searching for jobs is as simple as a Google search, pulling together jobs which best match their search query from a wide range of sources; for recruiters and employers, job postings will have greater visibility, providing they are in the correct format to be found by Google.

Many of the biggest recruitment platforms, including Reed, Totaljobs, and LinkedIn, have already partnered with Google for Jobs, recognising the advantages it will give them in making job listings easier to find for candidates. It’s interesting to note, however, that one of the big names in recruitment has chosen not to team up with Google – Indeed has held fast, stating that the company feels that it’s the ‘best decision for jobseekers’. While Indeed’s job postings will still show up on Google, this simply means that they will be shown further down the page, so potentially less prominent than job postings that are compatible with Google for Jobs.

Whether you feel Google’s new feature is a positive change or not, the benefits for improving the candidate experience can’t be overlooked. This ultimately makes searching for jobs quicker and easier, with added benefits such as being able to refine and filter their results, and see similar jobs from multiple job boards and career sites without having to trawl different websites.

How to make your job posts compatible with Google for Jobs

The AI that powers Google knows plenty of information about a candidate searching for jobs, but it doesn’t know about the details of the jobs on your site. Jobs need to be tagged by a developer depending on different factors such as skills required, benefits and location. Here’s an outline of what you need to do to create job postings that Google can read:

• You must ensure Google’s robots can crawl your job posting web pages, and that these aren’t protected by a robots.txt file or robots meta tag.

• Make sure your host load settings are enabled for frequent crawls.

• Include job listing structured data on your web pages.

• Be sure to test and preview your structured data.

• Keep Google informed by submitting sitemaps following the sitemap guidelines.

• To ensure you are eligible to appear in job searches, you need to follow the general structured data quality guidelines and technical guidelines, as well as job posting content guidelines.

• So that your pages can be properly indexed and ranked, follow Google’s indexing guidelines.

• Use Google’s guidelines for job posting structured data.

By making sure your web content is in a readable format, Google’s robots can accurately match your jobs to candidates’ searches. This means that a higher volume of candidates will be able to find and apply to your job roles, so it’s worth investing the time to make your job adverts and career sites compatible.

Final verdict?

Google for Jobs will have a huge impact on the recruitment industry and the way people search for jobs. Though the tech titan isn’t charging for this improved indexing service at present, it’s highly possible that they will start doing so sooner or later. Making this a payable service will make job advertising highly competitive, especially when it comes to traditional job boards. For now, though, Google’s new function is a welcome change which brings wide benefits for candidates and recruiters alike.

For further information view Google’s full guide on how to create job postings.