Searching for a new job can often be a challenging time, trolling through multiple job sites before you find a post that may be compatible – if you find one at all! Now though, the job market has a new saving grace - and it goes by the name of Google For Jobs.

If you’re an avid reader of our blogs you may have read about Googles mobile first-index update and how the consumer is key to all of Google’s decisions. Making it no surprise that Google for Jobs, is also user driven.

In fact, many recruiters are calling Google for Jobs the first job searching platform that’s main focus is the candidate - with job sites such as Indeed, Monster and Glassdoor being primarily focused on aiding recruiters.

So How Does Google for Jobs Work?

Google For Jobs is a search engine widget that allows users to see a list of job postings from multiple sites in Search Engine Results Pages (SERP). The listing will show the top three job posts best suited to the candidates' search term and a number of other factors that we will later go on to mention.

The featured posts will show: the company’s logo, their location, how long the jobs been posted for, expected salary, hours information, its respective source (eg Monster Jobs), filters to further narrow down your search and even the length of a commute from your current location! The aim is to provide the candidate with as much information as possible to encourage them to apply for the post. 

Here’s the results for the search “Retail Jobs Dundee”

With huge changes that could potentially shake up the £35 billion recruitment industry, it’s understandable that recruiters may be anxious about Google’s latest offering. However, you can use Google For Jobs to your advantage – with large recruitment agencies in the US seeing 600% increase in organic traffic since its launch!

Here are mtc’s Top 4 Tips To Rank in Google For Jobs.

Choose Your Keywords Wisely

Google For Jobs is primarily still a search engine, it uses keywords amongst a number of other factors to determine which job posting they’ll rank favourably. This isn’t time to post jobs using quirky job titles – Subway, I’m talking to you – “Sandwich Artist” is more likely to appear in search terms under “artist” rather than “hospitality” or “chef.” Which not only frustrates hospitality candidates looking for work, but artists looking for work too! We have several Graphic Designers who vouch for this. We would recommend using a free tool such as Google’s Keyword Planner to identify keywords with high search terms that are related to your job posting.    

Think About The Candidate

We previously mentioned that Google For Jobs is the first job platform that’s geared towards the candidate, which means your job postings should be too! By giving as much information about the job post as possible such as the salary, the jobs location and specific details about what the role entails, which also gives you a prime opportunity to include some relevant keywords. Google values job posts that provide as much useful information to the candidate as possible and will, in turn, rank these positions much more favourably.

Use Data Mark Up

Schema data mark up, commonly referred to as microdata – is a snippet of code that’s geared towards explaining a page’s content to search engines. Following its implementation in 2014 which you can read about here, it’s become great ranking factor across all site’s making Google For Jobs no exception.

Here’s an example of data mark-up mtc would create if we were to advertise an SEO position:

This code details the job title, a description of the post, our company domain, the industry, whether or not it’s full time, working hours, the closing date, our office location, salary range, and skills!

By adding microdata to your job listing’s code you’re providing Google For Jobs with the valuable information required by your candidate, which will, in turn, increase your ranking.

Follow Google’s Guidelines

Google have stated that having an expired job post live on your site can result in a penalty. Not only could this impact future job listings from ranking highly, but could potentially affect your site’s authority and have an impact on your organic traffic! Google recommends that once your job posts expired you do one of the following:

• Remove the page entirely
• Ensure the validThrough property is populated in the past (this data mark-up signifies the posts closing date)
• Remove JobPosting structured data from the page – this will stop signaling to Google that the page is a job posting!

Once these steps are completed it’s recommended you resubmit your sitemap to search console to ensure your site’s crawled with all amended changes.

So, there you have it! The recruitment process is taking a shift that favours the candidate, however, If you take the correct steps to ensure your job listings are optimised then you can use Google For Jobs to your advantage.  It’s also worth noting that all paid results will appear prior to Google For Jobs in SERP - so why not get in touch with the marketing team at MTC to implement the necessary Schema code and optimise your job listing to take advantage of Google for Jobs, or put in place a paid strategy to help you discover your perfect candidate.

Fancy working for mtc? Why not check out our current career listings.