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Advice for Employers and Recruiters

What do the new Google for Jobs rules about how candidates apply mean to employers, job boards, and ATS?

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock
Photo courtesy of Shutterstock
Steven Rothberg AvatarSteven Rothberg
July 19, 2021


As an owner of job search site, College Recruiter, I’m following carefully the many discussions that are occurring about a potentially massive change that Google for Jobs announced last week. Much of what I’ve seen and heard about these changes are, I’m afraid, unfounded speculation.

First, let’s make sure we’re on the same page about what is just Google and what is Google for Jobs. In most countries, if you go to Google and run a search for something like “engineering jobs”, you’ll see a well-formatted list of engineering jobs in your area. You can click on any of them to see more details and Google will typically provide you with a handful of sites where that job is advertised. The candidate can then decide where they want to apply for the job, perhaps based on their experiences or familiarity with the site. If they know your site is poorly designed, they’re likely to bypass your site in favor of one of the others. If they trust your brand, they’re more likely to go to your site than one they’re unfamiliar with or don’t trust. Once you get below that formatted search result, you’ll start to see articles, blogs, videos, and sometimes job postings related to engineering jobs. The jobs within the formatted search results are part of the Google for Jobs initiative. Those below are just regular Google.

For an employer, job boards, or applicant tracking system to get their jobs into the Google for Jobs search results, they need to do some development work that helps Google accurately “read” the posting. Google wants to be sure that it understands, for example, that the field beside your posting that says “Houston, Texas” is the location of the job and not the head office of the employer advertising the job. Similarly, Google wants to be sure that it understands that the salary range in the posting is actual and not estimated. The better that your developers “mark up” the postings through code that is invisible to the candidate, the more likely it is that Google will choose to show your version of the job in Google for Jobs. If the job appears on a dozen job boards and the employer’s applicant tracking system, Google will only show some of those in its Google for Jobs search result. Which versions does it select? Those which it feels creates the best experience for the candidate.

How does Google decide which job creates the best experience for the candidate? There’s certainly no human sitting in a cube in Mountain View, California looking at postings and making subjective determinations. Instead, as you might imagine, the entire process is objective and fully automated. Google applies rules that it creates to determine if a bunch of versions of the job are actually the same job and also to score each version of the job to determine which are likely to create the best experience for the candidate. To Google’s credit, it has been quite transparent about the factors that it uses to determine the score and also to advice the sites hosting those jobs on how to make their experience better for the candidates.

Last week, Google announced that it is about to make some significant changes to how it determines which versions of each job it will show in its Google for Jobs search results. The changes will take effect on October 1, 2021.

I’ve seen a number of articles and listened to podcasts that just flat-out inaccurately communicate what Google is doing. Perhaps the most commonly misunderstood change is to what Google calls directApply. The document does not say that the candidate will apply directly on Google, nor does it say that the candidate must apply directly on the employer’s site. What it does say is that the new “directApply” is a property, meaning data that the site provides to Google as part of the Google for Jobs markup. It tells Google that the candidate can apply to the job without having to register more than once.

A lot of job boards — but not all — will have to adjust their traffic acquisition strategies if they want to continue to receive organic (free) traffic from Google for Jobs. That means that Indeed won’t need to make any adjustments, as it has always opted out of Google for Jobs and, therefore, receives zero traffic from it. The sites that will need to make adjustments in order to tell Google that they comply are those that get candidate traffic from Google for Jobs, want to keep getting that traffic, require candidates to register, and then send those candidates to another site where they need to register again. In practice, these are typically job boards that require candidates to register before sending them to apply on the employer’s ATS or other such site as they’re required to register again on those sites.

At College Recruiter, candidates who are logged into our site do not enter any data when they find a job on Google for Jobs and come to the version of the job that we host, even if we then send them to the employer’s site or ATS to apply. Before Google announced these changes, we had decided to eliminate the requirement that candidates be logged in before sending them to the employer’s site or ATS to apply. We haven’t implemented those changes yet, but will do so well before October 1st. Why? A number of reasons, but one of those is that it is preferable to the typical candidate and that’s why Google is making these changes too.

Here is the actual language from Google:

The directApply property is an optional way that enables you to share if your job listing offers a direct apply experience. We define a direct apply experience in terms of the user actions required to apply for the job, which means that the user is offered a short and straightforward application process on your page.

You likely offer a direct apply experience if your site provides one of the following experiences:

  • The user completes the application process on your site.
  • Once arriving at your page from Google, the user doesn’t have to click on apply and provide user information more than once to complete the application process.

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