The search engine giant Google recently announced and debuted their foray into the job posting/aggregation space. Google for Jobs is a new platform for job seekers and employers utilizing Google’s existing search features in combination with feeds pulled from company’s career sites and third-party sites like LinkedIn, CareerBuilder, and Glassdoor. Free to use and with a fairly automated process, now is the time to optimize your job postings on your careers site for inclusion in this new search feature.
In this first entry in our 3-part series on Google for Jobs, we’re going to break down just how you and your team can prepare your job postings on your careers site. For the next post in our series, we’ll focus on the third-party sites like LinkedIn and Glassdoor, but for now, we’re only focusing on your career site. We’re also going to do it in a way any lay person can understand with minimal support from the IT department. Let’s dive in!
Make Your Job Postings Searchable
The first step in Google finding your jobs from your careers site is to make sure your website is registered with Google’s Search Console and easily found when crawled. If you’re not currently set up on Search Console, click this link to add your site and make it searchable by Google. Once your site is added and able to be crawled by Google’s algorithm, you’ve taken the first step in getting your job postings ready.
Structure Your Data Properly
This next step is crucial in ensuring your jobs will be shown in relevant search queries by candidates. Luckily, if you have an ATS that pushes your job postings out for you using an RSS or XML feed, this step will have already been done for you. If you’re manually posting your jobs to pages on your careers site, follow the format seen here to make sure your postings will be aggregated by Google. If your postings are missing any of Google’s required fields in the list here, your jobs will not be included in the jobs search feature. Again, if you have a fully functioning ATS that pushes jobs out for you, this should be built in and taken care of for you. This step is for those folks who don’t have an ATS and are manually putting jobs up on their site.
Submit a Sitemap
To ensure Google has the most current version of your careers site and job listings, it’s important to also submit a sitemap of your website. A sitemap is a simple file you create for your website detailing a list of all pages for Google to crawl. This gives Google a good sense of how often your site is updated and in turn, how often they should crawl the site for changes and new pages. Directions on how to create a sitemap can be found here.
These steps may seem technical and confusing, but we promise they’re simple to implement if you follow the directions provided by Google in the links referenced above. It’s important to jump on this and take care of your postings to ensure inclusion in this new search function. You don’t want to be late to the party and let your competition pass you by. With a 2/3 market share of all search traffic on the internet, Google for Jobs is a force to be reckoned with.
P.S.- Stay tuned for parts 2 and 3 coming soon! We’ll dive into even more features of the new Google for Jobs.