How to have your job posts show up in the Google Jobs search widget

Over the past few years, Google has been working to make job posts more discoverable through its ubiquitous search tools. As we all know, job posts are scattered all over the web, across an endless collection of job-boards, news sites, and networks. Their goal is to discover all of these posts and make them searchable and accessible within a dedicated Google Jobs interface.

If you're a company looking to hire, having your job appear directly within Google search results has obvious benefits. Your position is potentially displayed to many more candidates in a way that is relevant and timely. Additionally, your job post is displayed in a very prominent location within Google search results. Their jobs widget is shown at the very top of the page, before all other web results.

How Google Jobs works

When someone runs a Google search for something like "jobs in my area" or "sales jobs", relevant job posts from all across the internet are displayed. Google displays these job results within a powerful tool that layers in additional information when available such as: company branding, employer ratings, and commute times.

Individuals searching for jobs also have the capability to filter what jobs are displayed. These include things like category, date posted, company type, and location.

Google's primary goal with its job-centric search tools is to improve the hiring experience for both job-seekers and hiring companies through these simple and effective features.

How to get your job displayed in Google Jobs

There is no way to post directly through Google, but they do provide two options that will cover the majority of use cases out there. The simplest method for most would be to post through a third-party application or site such as Wrk. The other, more-technical option is to directly integrate your own site by adding additional structured data to the HTML of the job posts. We will cover both in this article.

Using a third-party that works with Google Jobs

There are many applicant tracking systems, job boards, and other sites that expose their job posts to Google in order to be surfaced in search results. There is no master list of sites that do this, Google's suggestion for those who are interested is to "check to see if your job provider is already participating in the job search experience on Google."

By default, any job posting created through Wrk is made available to Google and will appear in the job search result widget. So if you want a simple solution, you can try Wrk for free.

Integrating your own site with Google Jobs

The other option is to integrate your site directly. This is an option if you manage your own website for listing job posts. This option requires some technical experience as you'll be editing the HTML of your job pages.

Google provides some thorough technical guides around integrating directly. There are two primary steps: ensuring that your job posts are able to be indexed by Google and adding structured data about your job posts to the markup of the pages

With Wrk job posts, we also integrate with the Google Search Indexing API to ensure any new job posts are picked up by Google quickly.

With Google Jobs, SEO is still important

Regardless if you're posting through a 3rd-party system or have integrated your site directly, as with all web content, you still want to ensure that your job posts are optimized to rank well in search results.

The content of your job post itself is a major factor. You'll want to use relevant keywords in your job description that match the language a job-seeker would use when searching. Also, be clear and specific in how you describe your company and the available position.

Links to and from your job post are also really important. Your job post should link out to other relevant content on your website and you need to actively share your job post to as many other websites and social networks as possible.