Google’s latest venture makes it even easier for job seekers and businesses to connect. Are you set up to take advantage of the career platform?
With the pandemic playing havoc with the jobs market, the internet giant has rolled out Google for Jobs. Now, a broad range of job seekers can find your vacancies and open positions through a simple Google search. No more posting your adverts to a hundred different sites.
However, you may find your job postings aren’t showing up prominently (or at all) on Google Jobs. Here’s how to fix that.
Use the Google Indexing API
Google have an API just for Google Jobs to ensure that your jobs are found and indexed quickly by the search giant.
This can also help make sure that your jobs and found first on your own website, rather than the job aggregator sites.
Optimise your ads
As with anything Google-related, your job adverts should be fully optimised and search engine-friendly.
That starts with all the basic information – the job title, the location, the description of the role. Make the advert relevant for both the job seeker and for Google. But don’t just stick to a narrow set of keywords and phrases. Ask yourself, does this role have more than one title. For example, ‘office assistant’ and ‘admin assistant’ might yield two very different results.
If job seekers are searching specific terms, make sure you’re including them to guarantee you’re showing up in results.
Use Google for Jobs partner sites
Google for Jobs operates through partner sites. It’s not a closed jobs board like Monster or LinkedIn. Like its news service, Google aggregates lots of different jobs from lots of different sites.
Many of the big-name job sites, like Glassdoor, Monster, and LinkedIn, have partnered with Google. We wouldn’t be surprised to see even more join in the coming months – especially as the pandemic continues to play havoc with the jobs market. But currently, not every site is a Google for Jobs partner.
Check that the site you’re advertising on is part of Google for Jobs. If it’s not, re-post the ad to a site that is (you can still keep the original job advert live, too).
Set up your structured data
As with other Google products, Google’s jobs site uses ‘spiders’ to crawl the internet for information. If your careers website or job posting isn’t properly set up with structured data, these ‘spiders’ won’t be able to see what it is your site is telling them – so your positing won’t appear in any Google for Jobs results.
Read our guide to structured data for Google Jobs here.
This doesn’t need to be big job. You and your web developers won’t have to rewrite a million lines of code for Google’s benefit. Though you will likely need a web developer to get this set up.
Once ready, make sure to use Google’s Rich Results Testing Tool to make sure everything’s running as it should be.
Check out Google Search Central’s job postings developer page for more support or our extensive guide to Google Jobs here.
Ensure your site and job application process is mobile friendly
It is crucial to consider the mobile experience for job seekers. With an ever increasing number of British and international job-seekers using their mobile devices to search for job opportunities, it's essential to ensure that your job postings are optimized for small screens and that the application process is mobile-friendly.
This means that the text should be easy to read, buttons should be large enough to tap with a finger, and the application form should be simple to fill out on a small screen.
By providing a seamless mobile experience, you'll be more likely to attract a diverse pool of qualified candidates.
Consider testing your site and application process on a range of iPhones and Android devices to make sure there are no hidden problems or accessibility issues.
Now is the perfect time to get set up with Google for Jobs. For organisations like yours, it means your job vacancies will be seen by a much larger, more diverse, and experienced talent pool – and through a simple Google search, too. That’s bound to be better for your business.
To find out more about how we can help companies and organisations with Google Jobs and recruitment SEO services click here.