What Google for Jobs Means for Your Recruitment Marketing Spend

In part 2 of our 3-part series on Google for Jobs, we’re taking a look at how Google is utilizing third-party sites to boost their job offerings. In addition to scraping your ATS portal or careers site, the new platform also partners with major job boards and sites like LinkedIn, CareerBuilder, Glassdoor, and others. Google is serving up these jobs in their search portal and redirecting candidates back to those sites to apply natively on each unique system.

If you have a large spend with these sites, you‚Äôre probably wondering what this all means for your sponsored job listings. Let‚Äôs walk through a few key points to know when evaluating your current budget.

1. Don’t Break the Bank Just Yet. I would caution you to hold off on increasing your budget with these vendors until Google for Jobs has proved its value and you can get a clear insight into how your jobs are performing. Don’t be swayed by a flashy pitch from your account executive at these sites. Just because you pump more money into listings, doesn’t mean they’ll automatically be pushed to the top of Google’s results just yet.
2. Do Focus on High Priority Jobs. If you’re in the habit of sponsoring every job under the sun, dial it back a bit and focus on the tough-to-fill, high priority jobs your company needs to close. By focusing on a limited number of jobs, you position yourself to have more prominently featured on Google. It’s also a best practice to only sponsor a percentage of your open jobs, typically no more than 30% on any board.
3. Don‚Äôt Count Indeed Out. The obvious missing piece from Google‚Äôs stable of partners is the job search giant Indeed. As a pioneer in the job search SEO game, Indeed has always consistently produced the top search results for job seekers on Google. Google for Jobs is clearly a play to push their results above Indeed‚Äôs and force Indeed to play ball or potentially crush them. But according to Indeed, 60% of all their traffic results from candidates bypassing Google and going directly to their site so they may not take as big of a hit as industry insiders think. Give it some time before evaluating your current spend on Indeed. They just may surprise us.

Google is obviously going to be a player in the job posting space for a long time to come. By partnering with other vendors, they‚Äôve made a smart move to have others provide the content while they can focus on the delivery. But, don‚Äôt go crazy tinkering with your recruitment marketing budget just yet. Give them some time to prove their worth in the space and then adjust accordingly. And as always if you have questions or need some recruitment marketing advice, drop us a note at Kinetix, and we‚Äôll be ready to talk.