Since the release of Google for Jobs, recruiters and hiring managers have been wanting to understand what they can do to improve their ranking in search results.
As I’ve mentioned before, search engines have evolved, and to succeed in 2018, you have to evolve with them. That’s why salary, street address and company logo matter when writing a job description in the era of Google for Jobs. You can’t underestimate the impact of including – or not including – these elements on your posting.
1. Salary Data
Because common practice has been to save salary discussion for late in the hiring process, many employers are still wary of including salary information in a job ad. In fact, CareerBuilder research found that only 38 percent of employers say they include the salary range for positions in their job postings. Yet, withholding this information can do your job posting a major disservice.
There are two main reasons why job salary transparency is necessary. The first is because job seekers are demanding it. According to CareerBuilder research, 74 percent of candidates say they want to see salary information on a job posting. The analogy I often use with recruiters is that of real estate or travel sites. Would you look at houses that offered no list price? Would you consider hotel rooms on a site that contained no nightly fee information? Yet, within the talent acquisition space, we still expect users to apply blindly to jobs without knowing basic salary ranges.
Salary transparency is also necessary because Google for Jobs is listening. The Google team realizes the importance of salary data in candidates’ decision-making. In fact, Google will be including two separate salary data points for each job posting in the near future:
- Precise Job Salary Data: For each posting, there will be an available field for companies to include the specific salary range related to that posting. Companies who choose not to provide that data can expect decreased performance in ranking and exposure.
- Estimated Job Salary Data: Google will also display “estimated” salary data associated with each job posting published within Google for Jobs. Multiple sources (including CareerBuilder) will provide this estimated salary data, and it’s largely based on market data tied to the job title and location. This data field will be controlled through the Google experience and likely not removable or editable by the company.
Knowing candidates’ desire for salary data and Google for Jobs’ response, you’ll have a bigger advantage over your competition if you’re quick to adjust and respond.
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2. Street Address
Consumers increasingly use mobile devices for all forms of online browsing – including job searching. You can safely assume this trend will only continue to grow. That’s why it’s important to evolve the job-search experience toward mobile users. Job seekers have already overhauled the way they research, so you should rethink your mobile experience to match their expectations.
Mobile device users are trained to use maps in searching. The flood of map-based apps into the market is proof. So, it’s really no surprise that users also want to use maps to search for jobs. Job seekers want to quickly scan and see available jobs “near them” and see the job’s precise location to accurately evaluate factors like commute time and proximity to their children at school or childcare.
To achieve this enriched map-based experience for job seekers, you must include precise street address and physical locations in a job ad. Over half (59 percent) of employers say they include their company’s street address in their job postings, according to CareerBuilder research. Yet in reality only 14.9 percent of job postings published on CareerBuilder.com actually contain the street address. If you’re an employer who doesn’t include this information, expect lower ranking and apply performance compared to competitors who are sharing these details. Beginning in 2018, CareerBuilder will begin to infer the street addresses for job postings using artificial intelligence to boost posting performance and improve the job-seeking experience.
3. Company Logo
After Google for Jobs launched, many companies wondered why their logo was not showing up correctly in their job posting.
Surprise: Google does not pull company logos from the job posting itself or from their job partners. Instead, Google relies upon the organization's logo stored within their own “Google Knowledge Graph,” defined as “a knowledge base used by Google to enhance its search engine's search results with semantic-search information gathered from a wide variety of sources.”
In other words, Google gathers, stores and organizes thousands of data points for your company. They then use this data to improve the core Google search experience when displaying relevant results to users.
If your logo is missing or incorrect on your job postings, you will need to work with your internal website team to ensure they are following Google’s schema for your company website. This schema allows your organization to indicate to Google your preferred logo for use. The schema instructions can be found within the organization markup.
Understandably, there are a lot of questions around how Google for Jobs works and what best practices to follow. It’s new to the industry and will likely continue to evolve in the coming months – that’s why it’s important to work with a partner, like CareerBuilder, who understands the evolution of the marketplace.
