Google for Jobs launched in the United States last week, and looks set to make big waves in the talent recruitment market. Promising to use artificial intelligence to match candidates to the right roles and employers, Google will start displaying job listings directly within search results pages for “near me” searches.

With these new streamlined job listings available on both mobile and desktop, at a glance users can view details about the job such as the position, location, contract type, potential commuting times (thanks to the integration with Google Maps) and company reviews from sites such as GlassDoor.

For those job seekers not in a rush, there are robust features to drill down to find your dream role. You can filter jobs by industry, location, when they were posted, and by employer. And once you’ve found a filter or search that returns the job you’re looking for, you can turn on notifications to receive alerts to your Gmail account.

Nick Zakrasek a Google product manager said: “Finding a job is like dating. Each person has a unique set of preferences and it only takes one person to fill this job.”

So what are the benefits for brands and recruiters?

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For recruiters and employers, there is one big benefit in particular – it’s a completely free service.

What’s more, Jobs for Google can intelligently detect when the same job listing is posted across multiple websites (such as LinkedIn, Indeed, your own website and a recruitment consultant’s website), and de-duplicate those listings to deliver just one result.

That offers potentially significant cost savings for recruiters, and puts Google very much on a collision course with established professional networks and job boards.

And it levels out the playing field somewhat for smaller recruiters and businesses as they look for talent. Google for Jobs, at present, is separate to the main Google algorithm and that allows those brands that may not be able to compete in the traditional and competitive keyword markets to gain visibility in Google search.

How do I get my listings to appear?

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A simple code fix is all that is needed for brands to open up their careers opportunities to Jobs for Google.

Brands would need to mark up their job listing pages with the Job Posting Structured Data via Microdata, JSON-LD (recommended by Google) or RDFa, before submitting a sitemap (or an RSS or Atom feed) with a <lastmod> date for each listing URL.

Once the above steps have been implemented, we suggest using Google’s structured data testing tool to test individual pages and Google Search Consoles (GSC) “Structured Data” view to monitor for any errors as well as verifying your sitemap and make sure it’s error free.

Is Google land grabbing?

Yes and no.

We expect this to have a big impact on traffic and CTR within recruitment SERPs, especially for organic results. On certain queries we saw four paid ads, then the jobs listing feature and finally the organic links - way below the fold in most cases.

But for the application process Google is still redirecting users to the website where the jobs are hosted. Meaning those who are utilising the Google for Jobs may actually see increased traffic, similar to that of answerbox results.

Google has been clear about the fact that it doesn’t want to compete with the big recruitment websites and there are no plans to let employers posts jobs directly into search.

Looking to the future

Obviously this is a massive step by Google and has the potential to disrupt and change the digital recruitment and online job space.

Will this eventually lead to paid promoted job ads, similar to the local ads we now have in the local pack? As wearable tech becomes even more integrated with our lives, will we see Google collating personal health data suggesting new employment as we’re too stressed out during the 9-5 working day?

Like everything in search we’d expect the landscape to shift and change as we move forward.