Google Jobs is already changing our industry
I’m in the process of finishing the latest version of the Job Board Software Buyer’s Guide (out hopefully next week). In between the time I first sent out surveys to the vendors and the time I started writing up the results, the official launch of Google Jobs happened – or I should say, the Google ‘job search experience’, which I call Google’s job posting markup, and the Google Cloud Jobs API. So I failed to include questions in the survey asking about how the software vendors planned to support the Google initiative (or not).
However, through the wonder of email and a mini-survey, I was able to send out a 2nd questionnaire on the subject. What I got back was very interesting – and I’ll be honest, a bit surprising.
Here are the questions – and results:
Are you planning to support any of the following Google Jobs initiatives in your software platform? (Check all that apply)
- Google job search experience (i.e., job posting markup to make job postings discoverable by Google search engine) – 80%
- Google Cloud Jobs API service (using the Google search engine to power your job board software’s search tools) – 53%
- We are undecided at this point in time – 27%
- We do not plan to support either the job posting markup or the Cloud Jobs API – 0%
Did you see the response on those first 2 questions? 80% of respondents said they were planning to support the jobs markup! And 53% said they were going to use the Google search API to power their software. Like I said, I was surprised.
Think about it. Collectively, these software providers power literally thousands of job boards around the world – including hundreds in the U.S. (the only location where the Google Jobs initiative is currently available). Talk about an immediate boost for acceptance of both the jobs markup and Search API – and talk about an immediate injection into the recruitment marketing ecosystem. Add these to the employers and job boards with custom platforms that are already adoption these initiatives, and you can see that Google has already changed our industry.
As one respondent commented, “Whether you like it or not, we simply have to support it.” I suspect that’s where most of us are right now – the rules have changed for recruitment marketing. You can either ignore them – as Indeed seems to be doing – or adopt them, as everyone else seems to be doing. As to where this is taking the industry in the long run, I don’t know (and yes, that seems to be the #1 question I get these days). I’m not sure anyone does outside of the Googleplex – and even for them, there is always the rule of unintended consequences. If you think you know, please chime in via the Comments section below.
In the meantime, I’ve got a Buyer’s Guide to work on!
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Jeff,
Thanks for the survey data!
There is no doubt about the short-term benefit of increased traffic through Google’s new initiatives, but as you pointed out, it’s the unintended consequences that are worrisome.
It took years for Indeed to claim “all jobs” and “most traffic”,”sell directly” to employers and eventually “cut off” the very job boards that helped build their business.
When you cut through the noise, it’s most troublesome that Google is already reaching out to job board customers directly and their ATS platforms to acquire job ads thru job feeds and de-duping job content base on relevancy. Its not hard to imagine the unintended consequences. The only unknown is the disruption timetable. But as you stated, “Google has already changed our industry”, and it’s only been a few weeks.
The mark up is not rocket science, so it is not like they are asking website developers to reinvent the wheel. It still does not answer how 100, 1000, 10000, 100,000… 100M jobs all will compete for rankings inside the system itself. Once it gets busy and Google unleashes its pay model for Google Jobs then we will have the real acid test.
Plus the downside, if you are trying to rid yourself of staffing firms using Google Jobs which seems to be its main aim, is that you just made a ready list of places to sell your candidates into for perm recruiters as they can run the same search and the cold call/candidate marketing call is pretty easy. It goes something like Google the worlds largest search engine with trillions of searches, billions in resources and rocket scientist did not find you an ABC, or XYZ you can hire yet. Do you want me to send over Ted or Suzies CV/Resume now or wait four more weeks? Temp recruiters will not care as you need the agent regardless, well in the UK at least.
Use of Google as a job board engine is a bit more tricky, to call for sure.
[…] Google Jobs is already changing our industry: Talks about the ways job boards, Applicant Tracking Systems, and recruiters have reacted to the advent of Google for Jobs. […]
Google Jobs, what is it? I am not really into the techie stuff so I tried to search for it and all I see is Google Careers and the top of the list is a Glassdoor job list for Google openings. So I don’t really have any idea about it but when I read the article I understand that it is some kind of a programming thing. My only hope is that this will be useful for both job searchers and job portals like Indeed, Jobstreet and our very own SkootJobs.