When the service was first announced in 2017, Manchester-based digital marketing agency I-COM reviewed the websites of the 100 biggest recruitment firms in the UK to determine whether they were ready; and found that less than half (47) had the necessary functionality.
I-COM reviewed its results following the launch last week, to find that only 16 more of the top 100 firms had adapted their websites to take advantage of the new Google service - taking the total to 63.
To appear in Google for Jobs listings, recruitment companies must markup their job posts (tag data so that it can be interpreted by search engines) and add individual job posts to their sitemap. I-COM provides this functionality as standard on the latest version of its Recaza website platform.
Mike Blackburn, managing director at I-COM, said: “The major job boards have adapted their platforms to cater for the new requirements, and are currently dominating the Google for Jobs listings. Larger recruiters have been slow to react to the potential this new services offers, perhaps down to the cost of changing their systems.
“The slow pace at which the major players are reacting to this new service has created a real opportunity for smaller recruitment agencies. If they work quickly to integrate the Schema markup to their sites and optimise the job details shown, these companies could be able to appear ahead of big competitors in the Google for Jobs search results.”
Google for Jobs is driven by artificial intelligence and displays personalised search results that it has collected about the user from across the internet to deliver information about vacancies that could be of interest to the user.
To find out which of the top 100 firms reviewed have a compliant website, I-COM’s survey results can be downloaded here.