If you missed the announcement last year, Google is jumping into the recruitment space in a big way – and it keeps expanding its offerings in the space.
Why is Google’s entrance into the recruiting space such a big deal? When it comes to searching, Google dominates the marketplace. Google owns 77% of the search engine market¹ and over 73% of online job searches start on Google². This means that more than likely, the job candidates that you are seeking are starting their search in Google. The faster you can get in front of them and the higher up in results your job openings are, the better your chance of attracting that next hire.
Over the last year, Google has announced and launched three different products aimed to assist the talent industry, employers and job seekers:
This article will be focusing on Google for Jobs and how to get your jobs into the mix on the search display.
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In addition to the metrics around the number of job searches that originate on Google, Google is uniquely positioned to be a leader in job search with more experience in search algorithms than almost anyone else.
The average click-to-apply rate for job publishers (job boards) is 6.6%, while the average for Google for Jobs is 22.4%. That’s a much better ROI than pushing jobs through job boards and hoping the right candidates fall into your funnel.
There are multiple ways to get onto Google for jobs. Below are some examples.
From a candidate experience perspective, the direct route generally provides a simpler and better candidate experience as illustrated below:
Since the candidate experience is more streamlined, we’ll be focusing on how to get your jobs directly integrated with Google.
Check with your ATS or career site vendor to see if they have a roadmap or plan to integrate with Google for jobs. Share the information provided here and associated resources at the end of this article with them. It’s possible that they may have already integrated with Google for Jobs and all you need to do is provide them with the proper requisition data (see step two).
Organize and map the data required. Make sure the correct requisition data is discoverable and that your career site job vacancy pages are dynamic. You likely need to expose the correct requisition data for your careers site or vendor – either directly from an ATS integration or during job scraping. Talk to your web development team or careers site vendor about adding the structured data to your career pages in a dynamic fashion. (While you can add this data manually to the job vacancy pages, once you have more than a few jobs, it rapidly becomes unmanageable and not sustainable.)
As far as the data you will need to provide for each job, there are required elements and optional elements that you will need to expose or extract out of your ATS. Note that some of these values may need to be mapped to the format that Google is expecting versus what is already in your ATS.
Required Data Elements
Optional Data Elements
Make sure your jobs are indexable by Google. Check your robots.txt file to ensure pages aren’t excluded. If you are relying on an ATS provider, ensure your pages are not generated 100% by JavaScript and that they aren’t blocked or not indexable by Google, as many ATS pages are.
Create the structured markup for your job vacancy pages. For details on exactly how to code this, see our guide. Note our guide uses the JSON+LD format that is recommended by Google for jobs.
For additional information on the jobs schema – see Google’s documentation.
Test and validate your structured markup. Once you have created the markup for at least one page, run the markup through the Google structured data tool. Fix any errors found before proceeding.
Common failures include:
Add the structured markup code to your job vacancy pages. This will need to go right before the closing head tag in your HTML.
Launch the code, submit your sitemap and resubmit your sitemap to Google.
Once you have launched the new structured data onto your job vacancy pages, you’ll want to create a sitemap XML file to pass to Google. Likely you will want this XML file to be dynamic as well to capture all of your job vacancy pages and content and pass them to Google. Once you have this sitemap XML, you will want to submit it to Google and/or resubmit your pages for indexing. See building and submitting a sitemap to Google for more information on how to do this.
Check back in a few days or a week to see that your jobs are being indexed from your sitemap. (Google Search Console > Crawl> Sitemaps)
Also after a week or so, check Google Search Console to ensure there aren’t any errors with your pages/structured data. Ultimately, you will want it to look like below – showing no errors. If there are errors, you can click on the page to get details on the error to help you fix the problem.
Final thoughts: While implementing Google for jobs can seem overwhelming at first, if you break it into steps, it really is not all that difficult to get directly indexed. Better yet, there’s very little (or no cost) for implementation in many scenarios. The ROI for your efforts is native Google for Jobs listings that put you right at the front of job seekers’ searches. When done right, you put Google to work for you as the best job board money can buy – without any (or very limited) cost.
Need additional help in getting your jobs indexed or understanding Google for jobs? We’ve got you covered! Check out our Google for Jobs guide to get the help and resources you need or get in touch.
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