The Future of Recruitment?

 Google Jobs changed the face of recruitment overnight....

You may not have noticed it, but there was a quiet revolution last month in the world of recruitment. Google Jobs was launched. It’s a platform that has been talked about a lot in the world of jobs boards and Applicant Tracking systems (ATS). Why? Well, Google is now going to do to job searches what they have already done to content searching.

I’m sure you already know and understand the impact of having your website optimised for Google search. If you get it right and your content appears on the first page of Google, you will tend to get lots of traffic. If not, then you become reliant on paying Google to appear, or alternatively trying other means of promotion.

Google Jobs appears to be doing the same thing in the Jobs market.

If you aren’t aware of Google Jobs, you aren’t alone. ICom reported that over 50% of recruiters are not ready for google, meaning that more than half of the country’s leading recruiters will not benefit from being shown in personalised search results.

So, firstly the good news. If you are already a customer of GetMyFirstJob and our Talent Platform, you have nothing to worry about. We’ve been working on this for a number of months, and from the moment Google Jobs went live in July, your opportunities have been appearing, and so visibility of your vacancies will have increased... If you aren’t using the TalentPortal at the moment, you should check whether your ATS is feeding into Google Jobs. There are some surprising names missing in the world of Apprenticeships, including at the moment the Government’s Find an Apprenticeship (FaA) system. Many providers and colleges use this site as their main source of candidates. Historically, It’s been a great source of applicants and our integration with Find an Apprenticeship has always been our Number 2 source of candidates. With the introduction of Google Jobs, traffic and applications from FaA was halved overnight. Why? Well, Google jobs now prioritises its own jobs platform over everything else, and If you aren’t on it, you won’t get traffic. Conversely, if you are, traffic has gone up significantly as people are redirected to Google Jobs friendly sites.

If you do need to get your own platform up and running with Google Jobs, and give your ads the best chance should take a look at the main elements you need to put in place:

• Make sure your host load settings are enabled for frequent crawls.
• To ensure you are eligible to appear in job searches, you need to follow the general structured data quality guidelines and technical guidelines, as well as job posting content guidelines.
• So that your pages can be properly indexed and ranked, follow Google’s indexing guidelines.
• Include job listing structured data on your web pages.
• Be sure to test and preview your structured data
• Make sure your web content is in a readable format
• Consider integrating the Google-designed schema, openly available online.

This quiet revolution has had a major impact and as we now approach the peak recruitment period, it really is vital that your opportunities are as visible as possible. Without a feed to Google Jobs, you simply won’t get the candidates – they will be diverted elsewhere.

But what are the benefits

The main benefits reported are to the exposure it provides to recruitment and job vacancies. It is of course, yet another forum in which job seekers can access roles and directs traffic to the applications, irrespective of the origin of these vacancies

Google Jobs allows jobseekers to target their search, providing applicants with the opportunity to narrow their options by a variety of criteria from the job title (eg Apprenticeships). In theory, tailored applications for you and candidates will be more likely to apply to roles that specifically suit their qualifications.

The perfectly positioned jobs board on integrated into Googles’ search engine, organically  ranks and rewards content that’s considered, well-written and consistent with everything else generated. The AI-based system behind Google Jobs follows the same principle so your advert is in safe yet effective hands.

With GetMyFirstJob, the TalentPortal does most of the hard work for you. In the coming weeks, our customer support team will be working will all of our customers to help them improve the way in which vacancies are described to make them even more accessible.

For more information about TheTalentPeople, Google Jobs or Emerging Early Talent recruitment, please contact us on 023 93 876400.