Google for Jobs isn’t changing the recruitment process, it’s simply providing a more responsive and intuitive job search experience that mirrors how people use online search. By bypassing the need to spend countless hours sifting through traditional job boards, candidates can now effortlessly use Google to find appropriate positions directly in the search results.
A majority of candidates start their job search in Google, so it's important for recruiters to make sure their job postings are optimized to be displayed there.
Google for Jobs was specifically designed to gather job listings from both job boards and company career sites, ensuring personalized and customized results are delivered directly within search results. This means quicker hiring, which is better for everyone – candidates, recruiters, and companies. Google for Jobs doesn’t allow employers to directly post on the platform. Instead, you need to ensure you have the job posting schema marked up on the back end of your website to ensure your jobs are getting picked up.
Optimizing for Google for Jobs
Google compiled all the information you need to ensure your listings are included, but we have a quick cheat sheet for you:
- Ensure that Googlebot can crawl your job posting web pages (not protected by a robots.txt file or robots meta tag).
- Ensure that your host load settings allow for frequent crawls.
- Add each job posting as structured data to your web page.
- Use canonical URLs on each copy of the page if you have several copies of the same job posting hosted under different URLs on your site.
- Keep Google informed by either using the indexing API to notify Google of a new or updated URL to crawl, or submit a new sitemap to Google by sending a “GET” request.
What does structured data look like?
<script type="application/ld+json">
{
"@context" : "https://schema.org/",
"@type" : "JobPosting",
"title" : "Software Engineer",
"description" : "<p>Google aspires to be an organization that reflects the globally diverse ...</p>",
"identifier": {
"@type": "PropertyValue",
"name": "Google",
"value": "1234567"
},
"datePosted" : "2017-01-18",
"validThrough" : "2017-03-18T00:00",
"employmentType" : "CONTRACTOR",
"hiringOrganization" : {
"@type" : "Organization",
"name" : "Google",
"sameAs" : "https://www.google.com",
"logo" : "https://www.example.com/images/logo.png"
},
"jobLocation": {
"@type": "Place",
"address": {
"@type": "PostalAddress",
"streetAddress": "1600 Amphitheatre Pkwy",
"addressLocality": "Mountain View",
"addressRegion": "CA",
"postalCode": "94043",
"addressCountry": "US"
}
},
"baseSalary": {
"@type": "MonetaryAmount",
"currency": "USD",
"value": {
"@type": "QuantitativeValue",
"value": 40.00,
"unitText": "HOUR"
}
}
}
</script>
In addition to ensuring your job postings are optimized for Google, recruiters can easily optimize their career website and job postings. See our career website checklist for full details, but here are a few tips:
Optimize your career website
Employers' career sites should:
- Be mobile-friendly
With more candidates searching for jobs while on the move, ensuring your websites not only render on mobile but enable job seekers to apply via a resume saved on DropBox or through LinkedIn will ensure that applicants convert into candidates. - Have dedicated jobs pages
Each job posting should have its own unique page and URL to enable Google to crawl and aggregate each specific job. - Be accessible
Prioritizing accessibility ensures all prospects can access and complete your application process. While accessibility does not directly affect SEO, the two complement each other. Accessibility helps search engine algorithms understand the content better for improved searchability and higher search engine rankings.
Optimize your job postings
It is important that your job postings:
- Be tagged correctly
Job titles should appear as candidates would type them into a Google search. If you’re recruiting a Human Resource Manager, don’t call them a Chief People Officer, Culture Guru or other clever title. Use terminology that people are looking for—for example, the term HR Manager gets 5400 searches per month, whereas Human Resource Manager gets 18,100 searches. Using tools like the Ubersuggest Chrome extension can help you easily find which keywords are most commonly used. - Are specific
Including specific information like location and salary may sometimes be sensitive for recruiters, however Google’s algorithms look favorably on this information, increasing your visibility in search results. Other information like remote or in-office, work hours and benefits provide more information which may get picked up in search results. - Are quality
The Google Algorithm aims to provide the most relevant results, so having a thorough job descriptions which reflects the keyword and related terms throughout the post, including skills and experience requirements, plus insights on company benefits, will help your job appear higher in results. - Be on your website
It may seem obvious, but too often recruiters will post jobs on a job board or on their LinkedIn account but fail to post them on their own website. The beauty of Google for Jobs is that over time, you should rely less on job boards thereby reducing your overall spend. Ideally, you should try to post jobs to your website first to index to Google before posting to the job boards—both will likely index to Google for Jobs, but the aim is to get candidates applying to the job on your website before having to spend money on the job board itself.
Contact us to explore all the ways we can help optimize your recruiting efforts.