Can Google for Jobs Revolutionize the Jobseeker Experience?

Typing the words “marketing jobs” into a Google search today will result in a page with links to about 10 different websites, each replete with hundreds of jobs. In a few months (or sooner), that same search will bypass those same websites (to some extent) and populate job listings ranked by relevancy directly onto the search results page. Things just got real – for job boards, job aggregators, and even for jobseekers.

If you missed it, Google announced the launch of their new job search engine, simply titled “Google for Jobs”, at their I/O developer conference this May, creating plenty of buzz and leaving plenty of questions to be answered. Who will Google partner with? Who are they trying to compete with? What does this mean for job boards?

Let’s dig in a little bit and try and answer some of those questions.

Google for Jobs Partner Network: Who’s the Elephant in the Room?

Anyone operating a job board or anything resembling one is likely reaching out to partner with Google right now, considering the influence they have on the web. The search giant has already announced partnerships with LinkedIn, Monster, Glassdoor, Facebook, and Careerbuilder, but one big name (the biggest to be exact) in the job search industry is missing from the announcement. Indeed.com is excluded from Google’s list of partners. Is this a strategic move from either party? One could guess that Indeed feels Google might be invading their domain and is not very happy about it. While other big players in the game have joined forces with Google, Indeed might be readying for a battle to stake their claim as the go-to resource for jobseekers.

A New and More Robust Jobseeker Experience

According to Google, the main goal of the new initiative is to better connect jobseekers and employers. On some level this may mean that Google may just be trying to help stabilize what has become a very congested area of the internet. Like mentioned before, job x at company x could probably be found on about 10 different websites at any given moment. As you may know, this is because employers need candidates and will try and get their open positions up wherever they can, which can be a headache for a jobseeker trying to wade through the mess and find unique opportunities that they’re truly interested in. They might even accidentally apply to the same job more than once.

Google will likely take all these duplicate postings and only show jobseekers the option from the source that they deem best to apply on.

We can also count on Google leveraging their highly polished search algorithm to show and rank jobs based on a more exact search query, meaning that jobseekers can search for very specific types of jobs and get some legitimate results.

Google is also building out a job family taxonomy so that a basic search will show jobs that may not match the search exactly but will nonetheless fall under the same category. For example, if a jobseeker searches for ‘RN jobs’, Google will likely also serve up ‘Registered Nurse Jobs’ and ‘Staff Nurse Jobs’.

As this search engine develops over time, you might even be able to put in a search query like “jobs in marketing with less than a 30 minute commute and salaries above 60,000” and get job openings that are hyper targeted to your specific job search. Never put it past the Goog to revolutionize. Job posting sites should be looking to partner with Google so that their jobs are indexed and listed in their search results ASAP.

Hiring and Job Advertising Made Easier with Google

Hiring managers and recruiters could eventually find their jobs a bit easier to fill with Google for Jobs. In an ideal world, the enhanced search capabilities would match jobseekers with best fit jobs, so there could be less unqualified candidates applying around the web. Google will likely continue to expand this product and potentially allow direct posting options for employers looking to hire that will link people back to their careers site.

Google for Jobs may also help with improving job advertisements, as now they can hyper target users based on their search queries on Google. Almost everyone using the internet uses Google, and this will open the door to create some new ads that will target specific candidates based on their search history.

The Extinction of the Job Board?

With Google for Jobs, as well as other new technology, like Facebook for Jobs, it looks like job boards just took another hit and will have to adjust accordingly. If most of the traffic to all of these sites originates from Google to begin with, you can see the power that they have over these companies. Posting your job to 100 different places might not be what you need to do in a couple of years, and ATS systems could be reaping the benefit of this new technology. Getting your jobs from an ATS directly to a Google search may be the only thing you need to get all the candidates needed to make a hire, so job boards will likely need to figure out ways to keep people coming to their sites, especially Indeed.