Google for Jobs: high-potential job search or threat to the market?

With Google for Jobs, Google has tapped into another market. Many see a threat here, others an opportunity.

How much potential is there in job boards?

There are many providers in the field of job boards and job search engines: Monster, Indeed and Stepstone are fighting for market leadership with unusual media appearances and commercials. However, they also have to share this with business-relevant social media such as XING and LinkedIn. These offer not only a network, but also a job board and the opportunity to apply for interesting jobs directly from the network. In this respect, the industry holds enormous potential.

According to a 2018 Forsa survey, one in three employees is willing to leave their current employer if a better offer comes along. As a result, companies need to invest particularly in their employer branding and also in recruitment marketing in order to attract the right professionals. Over 77% of all employers do this with the help of job advertisements on the Internet. Furthermore, around 63% of companies use social media to draw attention to vacancies and, above all, to address a young target group. In monetary terms, this amounts to almost €2 billion in market potential.

What makes Google's job search so innovative?

With such a high market potential in the industry, it's actually surprising that Google's job search took so long to launch in some countries. After all, the search has existed very successfully in the US and other countries for quite some time.

The main difference between Google's job search and other job portals is that you don't need access, premium versions or anything else to appear in the job ads. Only the job advertisement is relevant and must be provided with some attributes to be listed in the search results.

This way Google avoids the problem that many job ads on job boards are outdated because nobody updates and maintains them conscientiously. The focus is mostly put on the own company page to present it as respectable as possible and the job boards are neglected. With job search, however, the company pages are given priority, which makes this function immensely attractive, especially for employers.

What numbers does Google already show?

With all the potential that job search and the overall market holds, the question now naturally arises as to what piece of the rich pie Google can already claim for itself. In fact, it's quite an enormous one. Because in almost 92% of all cases, the job search spits out a relevant result for the search query and is therefore in first place in the results list. Due to the size of the result box, the other organic search results are consequently pushed down.

Of course, ads from Google partners such as LinkedIn or XING are still integrated into the search results.

In the long term, however, it is the goal of the search engine giant to go directly to the source and to do without the intermediate steps in the form of job boards. This is probably one of the reasons why API indexing is visible and even desired by Google.

We at SEO for Jobs take care of this indexing for you. You can find more information about our services here