You may have your jobs listed on traditional job boards and on your career site, but if you don’t have them optimized and structured for Google for Jobs, you’re missing out on additional opportunities now and in the future.
Finding the perfect position can be a long and tedious job for candidates. Now, Google for Jobs is streamlining the job search process for candidates. Instead of spending hours searching traditional job boards, job candidates can go straight to Google to find their perfect professional match.
Understanding Google for Jobs
Google for Jobs was designed to aggregate jobs from those boards as well as from company career sites to deliver tailored results for job-thirsty talent. Google for Jobs allows talent to search positions without having to hop from board to board, sifting through irrelevant job postings. This means quicker hiring, which is better for everyone – talent, recruiters, and companies. Google for Jobs wasn’t designed to replace job boards, but with an easier, more stream-lined process, could it some day? You may have your jobs listed on traditional job boards and on your career site, but if you don’t have them optimized and structured for Google for Jobs, you’re missing out on additional opportunities now, and in the future.
Optimizing for Google for Jobs
Google compiled all the information* you need to ensure your listings are added to the mix, 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.
- Make sure you follow the Google for Jobs guidelines.
- Add job posting 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.
- Test and preview your structured data.
- 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.
Don’t forget to optimize for mobile
Talent is googling career opportunities from their phones while they’re at work, at home, in the bathroom, and waiting in line at the movies. They’re looking for jobs on the go – not while they’re sitting down in front of a computer – which means it’s more important than ever for career sites to be mobile-friendly, easily navigable and ready for crawling by Google for Jobs.
Companies that don’t optimize their career sites for mobile and update their data structure to ensure Google for Jobs is crawling (and choosing) their listings will be left behind. Make sure you’re prepared for the ever-changing career search landscape by partnering with a recruitment marketing agency that specializes in research-based, development and strategy can save your company time, money and help you get recruits in the door sooner.
Contact us to explore all the ways we can help optimize your careers site for today’s, and tomorrow’s, changing job search landscape.