How Small Businesses Can Effectively Use Google For Jobs

In June, Google announced its new job search engine, Google For Jobs. Because the announcement was so low-key, you may have missed it. Basically, Google is applying AI (artificial intelligence) to help jobseekers refine their job search without having to use multiple job boards. But what does this mean for small businesses who want to make sure their jobs get found, especially if you normally post jobs on your website, social media channels, or budget-friendly job boards?

Your first reaction may be to stop using job boards entirely and simply post all your openings on your website. Sounds easy, doesn’t it?

Before you get too excited about a low-cost way to get your job openings in front of your ideal candidates, let’s peek behind the curtain to examine how the job search engine works.

A search for CPA jobs near me will return results like this:

A jobseeker can click to see all the jobs and use various filters to further refine the search as well as enable alerts. This is cool if you’re a jobseeker looking to receive alerts only for positions you are truly interested in.

For employers, the job search query in Google returns only the link to the original job posting regardless of whether it is on your company website or a job board, which means you won’t receive duplicate applications if the job is posted on multiple job boards.

How to Get Your Job Posting Listed on Google for Jobs

There are two ways your job postings will appear in a Google for Jobs search. First, you can create a direct integration that requires some technical knowledge. You will need to set up the meta tags, allow hourly or at least daily sitemap updates that facilitate frequent crawls, and add job listing structured data. This is a lot of technical geek speak. If you have a web guru who can make sense of Google’s requirements and add this to your website, it shouldn’t be too difficult.

If you lack the technical expertise to follow Google’s requirements, it may be worth investing the time and money to have someone set this up for you so that your openings appear in a job search. The investment in geekifying your website may save you money on posting on the bigger job boards over time.

However, if the geek speak strikes terror into your heart, there is another way. Google has a list of third-party integrators who have already agreed to its technical requirements. These include many of the big players like Monster, Glassdoor, Facebook, and LinkedIn. What this means is that you can post your jobs on one of these third-party sites or others not on the list that have integrated the technical specs, like MightyRecruiter, and rest assured that your job openings will appear in a Google search.

So now can you sit back and relax now because your ideal candidates will easily find you and line up for interviews? Not so fast: there’s still more to consider.

Getting the Most from Google for Jobs

There are candidates who do not use Google as their preferred search engine. While Google has the largest market, your ideal candidates may be using other search engines.

If you limit your job postings to one site and rely on Google to spread the word far and wide, you may be narrowing your candidate pool and missing out on great applicants.

Here are a few tips to leverage Google’s job search engine:

1. Know where your ideal candidates are likely to be. Will they be searching your website, networking on LinkedIn, or do they spend their time on Facebook? Post on that channel, and even if your candidates use an alternate search engine, your jobs will still be visible to them.
2. Use SEO techniques in your job postings. Use a good job title and write an ad that includes the keywords your candidates will search for. If you title your job as a ninja or guru, will your candidate find you? You can use Google Trends to find out the most searched for terms.
3. Create a job posting that will grab your candidate by the eyeballs and make them click on the link to your job. The first two lines of your ad are critical, so use them wisely. It doesn’t matter whether your job posting ranks high on Google if no one clicks it. You can also tweak your job title to be more appealing. For example, instead of just “Accountant”, you could use a title like “Accountant who loves finding the story the numbers tell.”
4. Google will return only one result per job, which means posting on multiple boards, especially if they are one of Google’s third-party sites, may be unnecessary. Again, think about where your candidates are likely to search for jobs and base your decision on that knowledge.
5. Continue using sites that are not integrated, like Indeed and Craigslist. These are still many jobseekers’ first port of call, and you’ll notice in the example, that Indeed is listed just under the “Jobs” box.

The jury is out on what impact Google for Jobs will have on how employers post jobs. The best thing is to experiment a bit and see what works for you. In recruiting, there is no one size fits all—use the sites that give you the best results.