After nearly a year of speculation, a search engine optimizer in Australia capturing screenshots in the wild, and an official announcement from the CEO, Google for Jobs officially launches today. Now, when you visit Google and type in “marketing jobs,” “jobs near me,” “teaching jobs” or similar job searches, you’ll see results that allow users to explore jobs right from Google’s organic results pages. The one caveat is searches have to be in English on desktop or mobile.
“For many people, a job needs to satisfy some key criteria, like commute time, job specialties they’ve honed, or the hours they have available to work,” said Google in a release. “Looking for jobs is a personal and complex journey, and one that we are trying to support in this new search experience.”
Job search is the next step in Google’s march toward gaining market share in what’s becoming a very competitive landscape of very large tech companies. The first step was launching a job search API that Google calls Cloud Jobs API, which, says the company “provides access to Google’s machine learning capabilities to power smarter job search and recommendations within career sites, jobs boards, and other job matching sites and apps.”
The next step was unveiling Google Hire, which looks to be a lightweight applicant tracking system for small businesses. However, the product remains mysterious; as TechCrunch said at the time, “At this point, we don’t know what the back-end looks like, and it’s unclear whether Google Hire is derived from or even inspired by Google’s own internal Applicant Tracking System. The business model of Google Hire is still unknown. If access to the platform is expanded, it’s unclear what access to Google Hire will cost and whether it will be available as an a-la-carte service or will only be available in a broader enterprise cloud services bundle.”
And now we get job search.
