Google for Jobs Is a Game-Changer – Here’s What You Need to Know:
Your career site is the absolute best resource for candidates to obtain the information they need to apply for a job at your company. However, before job seekers ever reach your career site, they are first taken on a detour through third-party job boards, filling out duplicative forms and profiles along the way. The experience is incredibly frustrating for nearly every candidate in the job market.
To get a closer look inside candidates’ minds, iCIMS recently interviewed 500 employed adults to better understand their experiences, expectations, and pain points when it comes to job hunting. We found that candidates expect from the job search the same ease and functionality they experience with the apps and websites they use every day, like shopping on Amazon for a winter coat or surfing Netflix for a new series to binge.
Google for Jobs, a new suite of job search products from the search engine giant, aims to give job seekers exactly that experience. Through Google for Jobs, candidates can complete just one application on an employer’s career site, cutting out the job board middlemen and simplifying the process.
Google has already revolutionized the way we shop, find information, travel, and do pretty much everything else. Now, it is poised to change fundamentally how people find jobs, too. If your company is not already adjusting to the arrival of Google for Jobs, here’s how you can get started.
Optimize Your Career Site for Google for Jobs
If you optimize your career site for Google’s algorithms, your job postings will be displayed right in the applicant’s search results. Your ads will also be targeted toward candidates based on their specific interests, location, salary, responsibilities, experience, industry, etc., meaning Google for Jobs could bring a more relevant talent pool straight to your door.
Currently, there are only a few ATS companies partnered with Google for Jobs. (Full disclosure: iCIMS is one of them.) Work with your recruiting software provider to ensure they’re establishing a direct link between your ATS and Google. This will ensure Google can detect and display available jobs as soon as they’re posted to your company’s career site, allowing more job seekers to find your open roles right from Google.
More Is More: Don’t Skimp on Job Description Details
Get granular with your job descriptions. The more information you provide, the better the job ad’s ranking within Google’s search results.
Google for Jobs allows candidates to filter results according to a number of key criteria, like commute time and hours, so include the company’s exact address and typical hours expected for the role. The filter also includes salary-range estimates, which are typically pulled from sites like Glassdoor and PayScale, but you will have far more success attracting relevant candidates by providing accurate ranges right in your ad.
Use real-world, specific search terms for a job, such as “JavaScript developer” instead of something niche like “coding ninja.” Loading your job descriptions with the same terminology the average person uses in their search helps job seekers find you more easily. Furthermore, your ad’s transparency and detail will increase its Google ranking, driving more talent to your site as a result.
Create Valuable Content to Build a Talent Pool and Engage Passive Job Seekers
Google revolutionized how companies promote themselves. To build consumer awareness and demand today, marketers publish short, compelling, visual, shareable, and clickable content daily to ensure their brand is high in the search results. Your candidate engagement strategy should follow a similar method. You need to create authentic, engaging content and publish frequently on your company’s career and social media sites to be important in the eyes of Google’s search algorithm.
High bounce rates — people leaving your site quickly after arriving — have a negative impact on your search rankings. Work closely with your company’s marketing team to produce relevant, targeted, and snackable content that job seekers will want to digest. The goal is to get job seekers regularly coming back for more.
Make the content relate to your brand, but don’t make the content all about your brand. The content should provide genuine value to the job seeker. That way, you’re building a pool of talented candidates who want to stay informed and in touch, even if they’re not currently actively looking for jobs. According to our previously mentioned iCIMS survey, half of employees would consider taking another job if the right opportunity came along. Think of your recruitment content just like a sales rep thinks of a digital marketing campaign to generate demand at the top of their sales funnel.
Save Advertising Dollars
More than 70 percent of applicants start their job searches on Google, according to our survey. Before entering the recruiting space itself, Google essentially turned all this candidate traffic over to third-party job sites. These job boards and aggregators charged enormous amounts of money for employers to search through their candidate databases. This made what should have been the recruiter’s asset — job applicants and their data — into the middleman’s asset, which forced companies to spend billions of dollars on recruitment advertising.
Once you optimize your site for Google for Jobs, your company could potentially significantly reduce its advertising on job boards. Evaluate the impact Google for Jobs has on your talent pipeline. If you’re getting the candidates you need right from Google, there’s no need to buy advertising space on other sites.
Susan Vitale is the chief marketing officer at iCIMS.