If you listened to the last episode, you will know that I’m ending the year by highlighting two of the areas I believe talent acquisition professionals will be focusing on in 2019. In that episode, we looked at data, in this episode I want to explore SEO.
SEO has always been prominent in digital marketing, but if we’re 100% honest, it has never really been a big focus for recruitment marketing. The ongoing rollout of Google For Jobs is, however, going to provide those employers who do decide to have a focus on SEO with a significant competitive advantage.
My guest this week is Venkat Janapareddy, Founder and CEO of Jobiak, an AI-based recruitment marketing platform for Google For Jobs.
In the interview we discuss:
• What is Google For Jobs and which countries currently have access
• Why are job boards currently dominating and what is stopping employers taking full advantage of the system?
• How is Google ranking jobs and what can employers do to improve their ranking?
• What results are we seeing?
• The vital importance of detailed and well-written job copy
• Is Google For Jobs allowing employers to access a broader audience?
Venkat also gives us a summary of his top Google For Jobs tips and his predictions for what is coming in 2019
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast is provided by jobyak, the industry’s first recruitment marketing platform designed exclusively for Google for Jobs. For the first time in house, recruiters can take advantage of the immense power of Google by posting jobs directly to Google for Jobs without the need for job board middlemen. Jobiac’s platform encodes job posts to be read by Google and automatically posts them in just three quick steps. Visit www.jobiac.AI to try it for free today. Just enter the URL of your job post and jobyak will take care of the rest for a limited time. Recruiting Future podcast listeners can receive 10% off the monthly price when they sign up. Just use the code rfpodcast to claim your discount. The website again www Job AI and job is spelled G O B I.
Matt Alder [00:01:20]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 162 of the Recruiting Future podcast. If you listened to the last episode, then you’ll know I’m ending the year highlighting two areas I believe talent acquisition professionals will be focusing on in 2019. SEO has always been big in digital marketing, but not really that big in recruitment marketing. The ongoing rollout of Google for Jobs is going to provide those employers who do focus on SEO with a significant competitive advantage. My guest this week is Venkatt Janapareddy, Founder and CEO of jobyak, an AI based recruitment marketing platform especially built for Google for Jobs. Keep listening to hear some great tips on how you can get the best results from Google for jobs in 2019. Hi Venkatt and welcome to the podcast.
Venkat Janapareddy [00:02:19]:
Thank you Matt for having me.
Matt Alder [00:02:20]:
An absolute pleasure to have you on the show.
Matt Alder [00:02:22]:
Could you just introduce yourself and tell.
Matt Alder [00:02:25]:
Everyone what you do?
Venkat Janapareddy [00:02:26]:
Sure, definitely. My name is Venkat Janapareddy, Founder and CEO of Jobiac. Javiac is an AI based recruitment marketing platform for Google for Jobs. For those who don’t know, last summer Google launched their own job search engine called Google for Jobs just to give you some stats. Matt, 73% of job seekers start their job search on Google today. That’s roughly about 150 to 200 million job searches a month. But to get your jobs on Google, employers are required to add certain code to their web pages and this process can several weeks just to get started. That’s the reason 80% of employees are still struggling to get their jobs on this new Google for Jobs platform. At Jobiac, we make this process Radically simple. Using our platform, employees can now publish their jobs without having to write a single piece of code. We launched our public beta six weeks back. We are having an extraordinary level of interest from employees and industry leaders and we are very excited about it.
Matt Alder [00:03:31]:
I think just to drill down a bit on, on, on Google for Jobs. Obviously, you know, it’s been, it’s, it’s kind of launched around the world at sort of various times over the last, over the last sort of year to year to 18 months. But I think people might still be a little bit confused about, you know, what it does and how it works. Could you just give us, you know, just a sort of a very, very quick overview of what Google for Jobs actually is and how it works?
Venkat Janapareddy [00:04:04]:
Yeah, sure. So if you’re an employer, if you want your jobs to appear on Google, Google requires you to add typical to SEO tags. Google requests you to add a structured job schema on your job postings. And if you can afford to put the code on your job posting, it’s a great feature. Your jobs will automatically appear on Google. And as I mentioned before, almost 73% of job seekers, they start this job search on Google. The way it works is today, especially in most English speaking countries, Google for Jobs is live. All you have to do is type in. If you’re looking for a sales job or a marketing job, you’ll see a pop up with three jobs when you click on it. Google has its own interface like Google Travel. It has a Google for Jobs interface where you see a ton of jobs within your area and it does a great job of where you can filter by location, employer type by employer, and then you can click on apply on the jobs that you like. The apply automatically directly takes you to employer’s career site. If you have those job structured schema on your job postings on your career side. As I mentioned earlier, to get these structured job schema on your postings, it’s not very easy. They’re not same as Google SEO tags. It requires a developer and you have to write this code on every single posting. And that’s when we realized there’s a great opportunity to automate this entire coding process. And initially when Google for Jobs was launched last summer, most of the job boards around the world have partnered with Google. And as a result what you see today is significant number of jobs you see on Google today are from job boards and LinkedIn and job aggregators and employees are still slow to adopt this new feature. And that’s where jobiac comes and helps employees to get their jobs on Google.
Matt Alder [00:06:08]:
So, you know, that’s certainly something I’ve seen a lot working with the clients that I’m, that I’m working with. You know, Google for jobs tends to be sort of dominated by, by job postings from job boards at the moment. You know, principally because lots of employers haven’t quite got up to speed with how they can make the most out of it. I suppose, you know, my question is, is, you know, do we have insight into how Google actually ranks these jobs? So obviously there are, you know, there are different inputs going into the, into the system. You know, if I was an employer and I wanted to make sure that, you know, I was, you know, I was coming top for a specific search, you know, what insights could you give us into how Google actually ranks the jobs that come up in Google for jobs?
Venkat Janapareddy [00:06:54]:
Definitely. So number one, job description. That’s the key. You got to write a solid job description on top of it. If you can provide salary. When we looked at a million jobs on Google, we looked only 10% of them have salary. And if you can provide salary, the chances of you appearing on the top is going to be pretty high. On top of it, make sure you have a good job title. So job titles, description and salary. A lot of times employers forget to put the location. Location also plays a key role and you always want to make sure you put the location with the state and the country in it. Sometimes people forget, let’s say I put Boston, but I don’t put Boston, Massachusetts. That makes a huge difference. So overall what we have seen is most employees do tend to put location, but they don’t give a good job title and job description and then salary. But if you do all these four of them, then you have a good chance of appearing at the top and then candidates will find your jobs. And we are seeing a good result so far. Almost three to four times more traffic than the usual traffic that employees are used to get. So if you have ton of jobs, you know, like before Google for jobs, most employers were only posting their jobs on job boards. Not every single job goes to job boards because they’re expensive. But with Google for jobs, even if you have 100 plus jobs, you can push all of them. As long as you can afford to put this piece of code then you get now applies on all of them.
Matt Alder [00:08:27]:
So would I be right in saying that Google would prioritize employers jobs over the job board jobs? And also what happens if there are multiple versions of the same job? So say it’s on someone’s career site going into Google Jobs, but it’s also appearing on a couple of job boards. How does Google kind of sort that out or what does it prioritize?
Venkat Janapareddy [00:08:50]:
Yeah, Google does a great job as right now you would see a given single job if it comes from multiple job boards. On the career side, it does give you that option to apply. The candidate has the option of applying either on the career employer side or on the job boards. As far as ranking, like which apply comes first? Again, we don’t know yet. We’re also trying to find that out. But what we have seen so far is if you are a well branded company, you have a good SEO and you’re a direct employer, the chances of you coming first is much, much higher. Whereas if you’re a brand new company, you don’t have a good SEO and the job boards have good SEO, so they tend to come first. But as I Before today, 80% of all the jobs are coming from job boards. That’s why you’d see apply on Glassdoor, apply on LinkedIn. But what we are starting to see, some of the big brand companies where they apply on the company comes first.
Matt Alder [00:09:54]:
So obviously you know, you guys have a, have a product in beta at the moment, but I’m guessing that you’ve been sort of looking at analyzing the impact of Google Jobs, you know, since, since it launched. What kind of results are you seeing? What do you think employers are getting getting back from this? Is it, is it, is it, is it working?
Venkat Janapareddy [00:10:17]:
Yes, definitely it’s working. As I said before, if you have a good job postings, we have seen employees getting, you know, four times more traffic than what they used to get. And we have also seen employees who have bad job descriptions. They’re not seeing as much traffic as they used to compare to the other postings. So we have a client right now, he has 15 jobs and he has five good. And 10 of them are just okay. The five good jobs tend to get significant more traffic than the other 10 jobs. So it’s important to have good job description, salary, good location, good job title. For those guys, we are seeing three to four times more traffic than what they used to see.
Matt Alder [00:10:57]:
Is that because I know that the way Google works in other areas is it looks at how long people stay on the page once they’ve clicked through and how they interact with the target content. So when you say good job description, is that sort of contributing to the quality of experience that people are getting and Google’s noticing that and optimizing those jobs?
Venkat Janapareddy [00:11:20]:
Yeah. So Some employers do a great job of explaining what exactly the job requirements are, what type of skills they need. Some of them, they just don’t put in all the details. They just put in a paragraph and then they push the job to Google. So if you have the complete details, what the job is, what responsibilities, what the education requirements are, what are some of the skills required, if you have all of that, then you have a much better chance because Google also wants to make sure they send you good qualified candidates. They don’t want to send some unqualified candidates to your job posting. So they want to make sure they do a good job. When a candidate is looking for a specific job, they built so much technology into it, they make sure that the ones which have good job descriptions appear on the top so that the employees are getting qualified candidates as a result.
Matt Alder [00:12:15]:
And is this sort of capturing candidates across the board? Because I’ve seen people sort of look at this in terms of, you know, the employer job comes up when someone searches for jobs at that employer or jobs in that, in that location.
Matt Alder [00:12:29]:
Does it, does it, does it do.
Matt Alder [00:12:30]:
Quite a good job of casting a wider net if people are putting sort of slightly more generic, you know, search terms, search terms in there, does it, does it sort of bring, you know, potentially new types of candidate to employers?
Venkat Janapareddy [00:12:44]:
I mean, if you are looking for a generic keyword, right, if you’re a candidate, you do want to make sure if you say sales jobs in Boston or New York, you will get hundreds and hundreds of jobs. But most candidates actually do more filtering. Okay, show me jobs within like 15 miles of where the location is or a specific industry or a specific employer. And that’s when you get to filtered good jobs. But if you are searching for a generic popular job titles, you may end up getting jobs which you may not be qualified or which you may not be interested. But unlike Google search, Google does a great job on Google for jobs, they do have significant filtering, significant details on top of it. They also show you, even if the employer has not put in the salary, they have estimated salaries. They partnered with salary.com they show you what the salary could be. So before they send this candidate to the career side, they do a good job of showing all the details that are required so that the employers are getting good candidates.
Matt Alder [00:13:50]:
So obviously it’s impossible to, you know, to make accurate predictions about what Google will do next and how they, how they’ll take this. But I know that they’ve, you know, they’ve done sort of similar search search initiatives in other industries. To this one.
Matt Alder [00:14:07]:
What do you think?
Matt Alder [00:14:09]:
What do you think’s next for Google for jobs? How is it going to develop from here? What would your hunch be?
Venkat Janapareddy [00:14:16]:
Yeah, our feeling is right now it’s a slow start. They’re still not live in most of the European countries, it’s live in UK and Spain. I think that once they go live across the globe, I think they want to make sure they can disrupt this entire recruitment industry. Right now they apply. As I said, it’s pretty confusing if your job is coming from five different job boards. If you’re a candidate, it’s kind of confusing on which one to apply. But I think down the lane they want to apply to stop. My prediction is they want to apply to take place on Google. So it’s a single click apply. This will take some time. This is my prediction. Four to five years from now, they will integrate with all the employees and applicant tracking system so the candidate doesn’t have to go through this whole journey. You just apply at Google for jobs and then you’re done. And the resume automatically goes to the employer. And I think that will be very, very beneficial for candidates because he doesn’t have to go through a ton of, ton of applies and screens. I think that’s their long term. Right now they are testing the waters. They’re launching in different countries, they’re getting the feedback and once they get through all this, I think they’ll do a great job in terms of disrupting this entire recruitment industry.
Matt Alder [00:15:32]:
So just, just to summarize, I know that you’ve kind of, you’ve, you’ve sort of given, given these, given these tip tips already, but I think it would be useful to, to sort of finish up with just a, a employers need to do. So obviously there’s an element of schema encoding that goes with this that someone could do via their career site or via a service like yours. Further than that, what are the sort of top things that employers should be aware of to be ready for Google jobs? Either to make the most of it if it’s already in their country, or to make sure they’re ready when it launches?
Venkat Janapareddy [00:16:08]:
Yeah, number one is get the tax, get the schema ready, make sure you have this technology in place and you don’t want your jobs to be going to job boards or job aggregators. You want candidates to come to your career side. So number one is to get this technology in place and put in good job descriptions, put in the salary, put in good job location. Make sure you put in the location. If the job applies to market locations. Google for Jobs does accept multiple locations and put in a good job title and that’s pretty much it. Then your jobs appear and you’ll see a significant traffic as opposed to job boards because as I said, significant number of job seekers start their job search on Google for Jobs. So get the technology in place and put in good job description and you’re good to go.
Matt Alder [00:17:02]:
Venkatt, thank you very much for talking to me.
Venkat Janapareddy [00:17:04]:
Thank you man. I appreciate it.
Matt Alder [00:17:06]:
My thanks to Venkat Janapareddy, thanks as well to all of you for listening to the show in 2018. It’s been an amazing year with the size of the audience more than doubling. So thanks to everyone who’s listened, shared and recommended the show. I hope you’ll continue to Support me in 2019 as I’ve got some big plans which I know you’re going to enjoy. Thanks as well to all the sponsors whose support enables me to spend so much time producing the show. If you’re interested in being a sponsor for 2019, please get in touch with me for more details. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts or via your podcasting app of choice. The show also has its own dedicated app, which you can find by searching for Recruiting Future in your App Store. If you’re a Spotify user, you can also find the show there. You can find all the past episodes@www.rfpodcast.com. on that site, you can subscribe to the mailing list and find out more about Working with Me. This is the last episode of the show for 2018, so thank you very much for listening. I’ll be back next year and I hope you’ll join me.
