Pam Aungst — June 30, 2017 — June 30, 2017
Google has launched a job-matching initiative which is now live in US search results. What the company calls “Google For Jobs” aims to assist job seekers and businesses alike, by making it easier for candidates to find their ideal employers. This post will teach you how to utilize this tool to help get your job postings found by more potential candidates.
About Google For Jobs
With Google For Jobs, the search giant does not intend to compete with other job search websites. Rather, it has partnered with most of its major would-be competitors. That means jobs posted to partner sites will be surfaced by Google in the new Google For Jobs listings.
Job postings on a business’s website can also be surfaced as a Google For Jobs listing, as long as the proper markup is used. A new type of Schema markup for job postings has been introduced in conjunction with Google’s initiative. It tells the search engine everything it needs to know to turn your job posting into a Google For Jobs listing.
In this article, we’ll explain how you can get job postings on your site surfaced in search results as a Google For Jobs listing. There is a bit of work involved, but if you want your job postings found by as many potential candidates as possible, this is how it’s done.
Keep in mind that, for the most part, you only have to do it once. After you create the markup code the first time, you can copy and paste it to all of your job postings and adjust the information as needed. Or, if you prefer, you can take a shortcut which we’ll also teach you about.
Before we get into that, let’s first discuss what makes Google For Jobs more effective than simply publishing a job posting on your website and hoping for the best. We’re happy to explain why it’s worth the trouble of marking up your postings with additional code, and how it will help them get found by a larger pool of potential candidates.
What is a Google For Jobs Listing?
There’s a significant difference between a standard search result listing for a job, and a Google For Jobs listing. Google has designed a dedicated job search user interface that receives a prominent placement in search results. The job search UI features your logo, reviews, ratings, and job details.
Google For Jobs listings can be filtered by criteria like location and job title, which makes your listings more discoverable. This could result in a greater number of qualified candidates applying for your jobs.
Here is an example of what these listings look like in search results:
What Makes Google For Jobs Different From Other Job Search Sites?
The difference between Google For Jobs and other job search websites can be summed up in two words: machine learning. Google utilizes machine learning to serve search results, and is using that same technology to surface Google For Jobs listings.
Other job search sites are not as advanced. If you visit a typical job search site and enter a term like “marketing”, the results will likely be limited to job listings containing that term. This may include listings for job titles such as “marketing executive”, “marketing manager”, “Senior Vice President of marketing”, “marketing coordinator”, and so on.
If you visit Google and search for the term “marketing jobs”, you will see job listings containing the term “marketing” just like on the other sites. You will also see listings for jobs within the field of marketing which do not contain that exact term. This could include listings for job titles such as “SEO analyst”, “copywriter”, “graphic designer”, “PPC manager”, and others.
Google’s machine learning technology is able to understand which types of job titles are related to a particular field, even if they do not contain the exact keyword being searched for. This helps searchers find more job listings that may be relevant to them, and helps businesses attract more potential candidates.
How can you harness all of this machine learning power to attract more qualified applicants to fill your positions? We’ll go over that in the next section.
How To Get Your Job Postings Featured in Google For Jobs
First we’ll discuss the easy way to get your job posting surfaced in the new Google For Jobs listings. As we mentioned earlier, Google has partnered with a number of other sites where you can post jobs. These include:
- Careerbuilder
- Glassdoor
- Ziprecruiter
- Snagajob
- Jibe
- JazzHR
- iCIMS
- Direct Employers
- America’s Job Exchange
- Madgex
- WayUp
- myCNAjobs
- Higher Education Recruitment Consortium
- Jora
- Jobing
- Local Job Network
- Care.com
- Jobs.net
You can post a job to any one of those sites and it will be automatically indexed as a Google For Jobs listing. That’s the easy way to go about it, but there’s a slight drawback as it is not connected to your website in any way.
It’s beneficial to publish a job listing to your own website, and adding the correct markup, because it draws more attention to your home on the web. A property you own. A place where candidates can learn more about your business, and possibly get some important questions answered before applying for the job.
With that said, let’s finally discuss how to mark up your own job postings.
How to Create Google For Jobs Postings on Your Site
First, it’s important to make sure your job posting web pages are getting crawled and indexed by Google. That means not blocking Googlebot with a noindex meta tag. To be extra sure Google knows about your pages, you can manually submit them here.
Your next step is to add the required structured data markup to your job posting web pages. You can learn more about that in Google’s guide, or on Schema.org. After adding the required markup, check whether or not it has been implemented correctly using Google’s structured data testing tool.
Once you have confirmed the markup has been properly added to your job postings, you must include the pages in your sitemap. This informs Google of additions, removals, and changes to your job postings. Every time you update your sitemap you should ping Google by entering the following URL into the address bar of your browser:
http://www.google.com/ping?sitemap=location_of_sitemap
Of course, that is just an example. You need to use the actual, complete URL of your sitemap. Here’s another example:
http://www.google.com/ping?sitemap=http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml
If you need to remove a job posting that is no longer available, you can do any or all of the following:
- Remove the page from your sitemap
- Remove the job posting markup from the page
- Add a noindex meta tag to the page
- Remove the page entirely
Having a listing for a job that is no longer available is actually a violation of Google’s new guidelines for job postings. So it’s in your best interest to either remove the listing if you’re no longer taking applications, or at least make sure it’s not indexed in Google.
Conclusion
We hope this helps you attract more candidates to fill your open job positions. It has been determined that 46% of US employers face talent shortages and find it challenging to find the right candidates. If you’re among them, you can address those issues by utilizing Google For Jobs.
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