Google just rolled out Jobs Search making it easier for thousands to get employed

On Tuesday, 24 March, Google rolled out Google for Jobs - a service that allows users to find job listings within search results - in India. The service was unveiled back at Google I/O in 2017 and has now expanded to India. The service is available on the desktop, iOS and Android.

It's a totally new experience for job seekers in India and will benefit the millions of people connecting to the internet on a daily basis, especially those first-time users. At the moment, it is only available in English but Google has promised many more languages in the near future. For the jobs-search integration, Google has been working with multiple job portals and forming partnerships. They include Freshersworld, IBM Talent Management Solutions, LinkedIn, WinsdomJobs, TimesJobs, Shine.com and others.

Google's main aim with this initiative is to connect job-seekers with employers. “With this new experience, we aim to connect Indians to numerous opportunities across the country. No matter who you are or what kind of job you’re looking for, it will now be easier to find job postings that match your needs and skills,” Achint Srivastava, Software Engineering Lead, Search Engineering Team wrote in a blog post.

Google says it currently has over a million job listings over ninety thousand employers.

Simple to use

All one has to do is open up a Google search box and type in a query like "writing jobs in New Delhi" or "management jobs". Upon hitting the search buttons, users will see a card pop up from where they can further refine their search query. For example, users can narrow their results by title, location, date posted and type. Users can bookmark and save jobs for viewing later, and they can see when the job was posted, via which job portal and see the salary band on offer.

Once the users find a particular query that works for them, they can also turn on notifications. This means they will get an instant alert when a new job is posted matching that personalised query.

Google is not letting job seekers directly apply for a job through the search results. Instead, it will redirect to the job listing page on the partners' portal.

More partnerships

Google doesn't just want to limit the search results to the current job portal partners. The company has published open documentation. This allows employers and third-party job search platforms to have their job openings discoverable via Google Search.

At the launch at I/O in 2017, Google said it was using AI to make sure that duplicate listings don't exist on its service. Today, in India, there was absolutely no mention of that. "We think we can help users look for and find relevant jobs in a very easy way through our experience," said Rajan Anandan, Vice President India and Southeast Asia.

Why is Google launching this, one may ask? The company says that in Q4 of 2017, there was a 45% jump in job search queries compared to the previous year. More than 50% of those queries came from the mobile. Mobile-based queries are up a whopping 90% year-on-year.