Google for Jobs: How Google Revolutionizes the Job Market and You Benefit in Recruiting

By Henner Knabenreich

Almost all search queries are now made via Google and the search for a new job via Google is also increasing steadily. Thanks to Google for Jobs, Google's claim to offer users the best search experience is now also evident in the job search. Henner Knabenreich presents the most important findings about Google for Jobs and provides important tips and hints for successful use. He shows that companies benefit from an unprecedented opportunity to provide reach - regardless of size, industry and job description. To bring applicants and companies together in the best and fastest possible way is Google's claim. Find out how you as an employer can benefit from this job search here.

The author:

Henner Knabenreich has been working on the career pages and application processes of employers since 2003. As an “employer branding optimizer”, he advises companies on the implementation of career websites, has been promoting the role of SEO in the context of recruiting for years and observes Google's activities in the job market. He is author of the book "Career Websites with Wow! effect" and blogs on an influential HR blog.

This Springer essential is a translation of the original German 1st edition essential, Google for Jobs by Henner Knabenreich published by Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature in 2019. The translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence (machine translation by the service DeepL.com). A subsequent human revision was done primarily in terms of content, so that the book will read stylistically differently from a conventional translation. Springer Nature works continuously to further the development of tools for the production of books and on the related technologies to support the authors.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Springer
• Release date: Aug 27, 2021
• ISBN: 9783658331139

Book preview

© Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2021

H. KnabenreichGoogle for JobsSpringer essentialshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-33113-9_1

1. Introduction

Henner Knabenreich¹  

(1)

personalmarketing2null, Wiesbaden, Germany

Henner Knabenreich

Email: [e-mail]

Job boards have long since ceased to be the only online channel through which potential applicants can find potential employers when looking for a job. Increasingly, Google is also the first choice when it comes to job search. It’s quite obvious that googling is ultimately the solution for everything. Google accounts for almost 100% of all mobile search queries, while on the desktop it is still almost 90%. A life without Google, it seems, is no longer possible. And so one searches via Google not only for news, prescriptions, holiday destinations, doctors and craftsmen but also for jobs. This is how it used to work: If you googled for job offers, such as Jobs in Marketing Bielefeld, Google would usually first present you with the so-called Google Ads (i.e. paid ads)—predominantly occupied by advertising job boards fighting for the traffic of each user—and then the organic search results in the form of link suggestions. As a rule, this is also fed by job boards, because very few companies have recognized to date what an important channel Google represents for recruiting and have optimized their jobs or career websites accordingly for search engines (SEO).

And whether Google Ad or organic search results, a potential candidate would first have to click on one of the displayed links to get to a search results page within a job board (or career site, if applicable). Once there, he could then search the job results lists for a suitable position. When he had found it, he could then click on the apply button.

If I write here in the past tense, there are reasons for that. Because the above-described way of searching for jobs (via Google) is history since June 2017. On this date, which revolutionized the recruiting world, Google’s Google Job Search Experience, better known as Google for Jobs, premiered in the USA. Following its rollout in more than 120 countries, job seekers all over the world have been enjoying a job search experience and recruiters all over the world are enjoying a reach for employers and a job placement accelerator that has never been seen before in this form.

1.1 The Importance of Google for Job Search

According to Google, over 70% of users worldwide also use the search engine to find jobs. Trend: Increasing. In a country like Germany, according to a study by Careerbuilder, over 50% of those surveyed use Google to search for jobs [1]. A further study goes into more detail: According to this study, 43.3% of those surveyed use Google to search for jobs, 49.3% to find potential employers, and 64.7% to find more information about the employer [2] —with a clear upward trend here as well. Google also leads the way in the search for apprenticeships. In Germany, Google is the most frequently used channel for apprentices: According to the study Azubi-Recruiting Trends, 84.3% of them use Google very often or often to search for a training place [3].

All these figures impressively underscore the fact that Google has become almost indispensable for many people in their job search. And as a result, how important it is to be represented in the top search results on Google with one’s own career website or job offers. Because only those who are present here will be noticed by potential applicants or can strengthen their profile in this way.

The fact that many companies are still not found via Google despite a large number of advertised jobs can have various reasons. One reason is, for example, that all jobs are advertised among themselves on a single HTML page. Google can’t pick out individual job offers from this and display them in a search result list. It is therefore important to set up a separate HTML page for each position, which can be accessed via separate web addresses and indexed by Google. Another reason is in many cases the embedding of jobs from the applicant management system via Iframe. Not only does this look unattractive in most cases, but it also poses the problem that the information is (or, let’s say, was) virtually invisible to Google and subsequently to a potential applicant. Because if the jobs are prepared accordingly—see Chap. 4—then Google doesn’t care whether the jobs are embedded via Iframe or not. However, this does not change the fact that the whole thing not only looks ugly but also makes the user experience less pleasant, especially on the smartphone. And then there are even companies that embed their job ads as images or make their job postings available exclusively as PDF or Word documents. This makes them undetectable to Google—and, of course, to potential applicants as a result.

And it is precisely this findability of jobs, the greatest possible transparency of job offers published on the net: that is what applicants want. This is also the conclusion of a study by the e-recruiting software provider Softgarden [4]. In Germany alone, the sheer oversupply of job boards ensures that potential applicants quickly lose track of the situation and real market transparency is not possible. Apart from this, many job boards or job crawlers only process the job search results of other job boards, so that a large number of duplicates exist. "It would be good if there was only one platform where all job advertisements are