A good recruiting process is the most important pillar for healthy company growth. After all, qualified specialists and team members who are willing to learn are the greatest capital that companies have.
It is accordingly important to establish processes that ensure sustainable employee recruitment. One component of this process is Google for Jobs.
Google’s job search, integrated into the normal search function, is a useful way to increase the reach of your job offers with relatively little effort. We explain to you what Google for Jobs is all about and how you can make the right adjustments to be successful in this search engine …
What is Google for Jobs?
Google for Jobs is the job search function on Google. This is not a standalone site or platform. Instead, the respective content is simply integrated into the normal Google search.
So Google recognizes the search intention and understands which queries indicate a job search and then plays the corresponding Google for Jobs element at position 0 (after the ads, before the organic search results).
It is important to understand that Google for Jobs is not an independent job platform. It is more about a kind of meta-search that browses other job platforms and websites for relevant job advertisements. It is therefore not possible to advertise specifically.
This has the advantage that Google for Jobs is free – for job seekers and employers.
How does Google for Jobs work?
Basically, Google job advertisements work in the same way as organic search results: It is not possible to be listed in the best possible way through money or an application.
Instead, Google sends its crawlers, which read out the job platforms and your website and evaluate the content according to certain criteria. In the case of SEO, it is assumed that there are over 200 factors that have an impact on organic ranking.
It’s the same with Google for Jobs: you can not post a job ad or shop there. Accordingly, no costs arise. Instead, Google searches your website for job offers, which are then displayed in the search engine. Here, too, it is important to optimize your own job offers on the website so that they are recognized as such by Google and accepted in the best possible way.
Why Google for Jobs is important for your recruiting
Rightly so, you may be asking yourself: Why should I want to use Google for Jobs at all? After all, you already have your website where the job offers are available. You may also place additional job ads on job portals or advertisements and billboards. So why go through the hassle of adapting to Google for Jobs? There are 3 simple reasons:
It’s free. Once you have adjusted your vacancies accordingly, you will not incur any further costs. Such an opportunity should not be missed, especially in sectors that have to fight particularly hard for skilled workers.
It matches user behavior. You may know it from yourself. If you need information these days, just google it. Job portals or career areas of companies are accessed directly less and less often. Instead, you use the search engine, enter the job search and click through the results. It is therefore important that you adapt to this changed usage behavior in order to continue to be present in your vacancies.
It promises reach. From the changed user behavior in relation to job searches, this point arises by itself. When more people use Google search to find jobs, it automatically increases the reach of Google for Jobs. Accordingly, other platforms are losing clicks and relevance. Accordingly, it is important to appear in Google job ads for maximum reach.
In short: The effort for the right setup is – as you will find out in more detail below – within limits, apart from that, there are no costs or disadvantages. The positive effects clearly predominate and speak in favor of always considering Google for Jobs as part of recruiting employees in online marketing.
Fill vacancies: a guide to Google for Jobs
1. Deposit structured data
As so often with Google, it is necessary that you give appropriate notice. Finally, it is important that the job advertisements on your website are really recognized as job advertisements. From a technical point of view, the recording works via structured data.
It actually works here for the schema.org data type “JobPosting”. Without going into too much technical depth, this means that you have to store certain structured data so that Google can see that it is a job offer – and read it out and accept it accordingly.
2. Make sure the content is complete
So that the job advertisement displayed on Google for jobs really fulfill their purpose, you should pay attention to content that is as detailed as possible. Of course, this does not mean that you should flood potential applicants with information. But some basic content should be on each of your job pages:
- Job Title
- Company information
- Job description
- Expected Applicant profile
- Benefits of the job
- Contact details & contact person
In principle, someone who finds the job ad via Google for Jobs should no longer have to go to your website. Instead, all content required for the application should be directly available. This corresponds to Google’s approach of offering a user experience that is as pleasant and uncomplicated as possible.
But the fact is also here: It’s about basic content that you should always provide on the job pages of your website, even if you don’t focus on Google for Jobs. So just pay attention to verbosity and completeness.
3. Consider SEO
Google is a search engine and that’s how they work Google job ads. If you want to do well in the organic search, you cannot avoid the topic of SEO. It’s the same with Google for Jobs.
So if you want to publish job offers on your website that also perform well in Google job advertisements, you should fundamentally think about keywords and SEO texts. Research relevant key terms and search queries to enrich the content of your vacancies.
This can e.g. mean adapting the specific job title to the search volume.
Of course, this only works when it comes to synonyms that describe the same job (for example, writer, copywriter, copywriter, content creator text …).
From frequent search queries, you can also derive which topics are interesting for the job advertisement (If salary is often searched for in connection with job searches, it could be useful to write a sentence about it).
In the concrete implementation, it is mostly about SEO basics such as the corresponding metadata for your job pages, a meaningful URL with keywords, a clear headline structure with well-placed keywords, and the Alt and title tags of imported images.
Optimize your website for Google Jobs
Of course, these optimizations will not ensure that your application numbers suddenly explode. Unfortunately, there is no simple trick for significantly more applications. Instead, it is about combining many individual building blocks into a large HR process. This is the only way you will be able to attract skilled workers and young people in the long term and sustainably.
In this process Google for Jobs should definitely play a role.
