Introduction
Employers and recruiters have been expectant over the technology giant’s foray into the job search market in the past week.
For advertisers and employers there are lots of questions:
- Is Google Jobs looking to cut out job boards?
- How is the recruitment industry reacting?
- What do people have to do to be included in listings?
- How does it work?
- What does the candidate get out of it?
There’s little need to panic however, as there are plenty of routes into the new solution.
First off let’s have a look at what the fundamental proposition is…
What is Google Jobs?
It’s perhaps slightly ironic that if you try to look up “Google Jobs”, the first thing you’ll notice is a list of jobs that have some form of professional relation to Google, rather than any information about the service and how it works.
Google is a leader in delivering information, in fact, it’s THE leader. It’s revolutionised the way people access information, products, services, business, media, news, location details and so on.
What Google has done over its history is to create a new way of displaying information. Jobs is another piece in the global information puzzle.
If you were to head over to Google search for your favourite local restaurant by name you’ll probably see a business listing with a few extra details, opening hours, a map and a telephone number. Take this same principle and apply it to jobs.
Google is looking to give people this quickest possible route to multiple job listings.
As an example, people might search for a job title and location. They’re the most commonly considered factors in the early stage of a job hunter’s search. Google’s pretty much mastered location-based searches already. All it needs to do to understand the intent of the user, in this instance, that they are looking for a job.
Context and intent is something Google is very skilled at identifying. For those that don’t work with search technology or language, this so called “semantic search” is designed to assimilate phrases and requests in the same way that a human would.
Good news for candidates
Interestingly, Google aren’t first out of the traps. Indeed is a household name and are the current leaders in job aggregation.
The difference is that Google is a window on the world, not just the job market, giving it a much larger existing user base which it will capitalise on.
Most internet browsers worth using are set up to use a Google search by default. In a world increasingly designed to accommodate extreme convenience, it’s not hard to envisage that candidates will quickly adopt this super-efficient route to accessing job information.
It’s good quality information too.
The job data is amalgamated from partner job boards who have made agreements with Google to post compatible information and direct employers that meet criteria around technical specification and reputation. Furthermore, spam and fake listings are well within the sights of the product managers at Google and designing technology that excludes unwanted information is a big part of what makes them Google so successful.
This blend of established job board data and reputable company listings means that candidates can expect a high-quality service.
What about job boards?
The likelihood is that they’re not going anywhere. As with every new marketing platform, there will be those that adopt early in an attempt to take the advantage and those that are more cautious and wait to see how the market changes before committing resources to new options.
In partnering with Google, it seems that most job boards are taking the view that the potential traffic generated from a global search provider could even be a welcome opportunity. Reed, Totaljobs, CV Library and Guardian are a few of the long-established stalwarts that will be working in partnership with the search giant.
There’s one significant rival who has decided not to partner with Google: Indeed. With a leading position in the job advertising and aggregation market however that’s no great surprise and the early indicators seem to suggest that this has not impacted Indeed’s performance. Time will tell but with a well establish client roster and huge traffic levels, a black Monday crash scenario isn’t on the cards for Indeed anytime soon.
Whilst job boards can add Google Jobs as an extra bonus on top of their established candidate databases and user groups, it seems that the degree of disruption, initially at least, will be small.
How employers can access Google Jobs
There are a couple of paths as mentioned earlier in this article.
This includes a direct route of ensuring the correct technical configuration exists on the careers site. Guidance is available on this from Google themselves. The secondary route is the fast one, as it only requires presence on one of the partnering job boards, of which there are plenty to choose from and many recruiters may already be engaged with these job boards.
For plenty of recruiters this is not new territory. Search advertising has been in the savvy recruiter’s arsenal for a while now. The concept of getting jobs delivered to candidates right at the start of their journey is something that recruitment marketing agencies and in-house digital employer marketing teams will have acted on through Adwords.
Conclusion
The immediate question for those with a recruitment requirement is whether they are going to be able to generate traffic by advertising on a partner website, or that they have met the right technical specification on their internal employer website.
For those already acting to take advantage of the world’s biggest traffic source, we see two focal points to look at next. First is achieving best value from existing media partners, it’s a good time to test the market and put media buying agencies and media owners to work in delivering value. The bigger prize however will go to the businesses that invest in employer brand reputation and successfully set themselves apart in the next competitive marketplace.
