The long, hot days of summer gave way to the shorter, cooler days of fall, which segued right into the holiday season, and now all of a sudden, we’re right in the midst of 2018. Although it seems like an eternity ago, it’s been only about seven months since Google for Jobs went live within the U.S. However, the buzz around Google’s disruption of the recruitment marketing industry hasn’t cooled off. Since June 20, job seekers in the U.S. have had plenty of time to get used to these new results, and Google’s “Google Cloud Jobs API” machine-learning technology went into beta and has been renamed “Cloud Job Discovery.” More recently, we’ve seen updates to the search results in the areas of salary info, location searching, apply destination, and the ability for job seekers to save jobs that they want to revisit at a later date.
I had the pleasure of speaking at the ERE Conference in Minneapolis last October and thought it might be helpful to share some of the behavioral data that we’ve captured across our network of TalentBrew career websites as it relates to the “Google for Jobs Era.” By no means does this tell the entire Google for Jobs story. We’ve been approaching the overall impact of this paradigm shift from multiple angles, and will continue to do so moving forward. The main goal of this data is to evaluate the impact on job seeker behavior from users who land on company career sites directly from their organic Google search queries.
While I plan to share all the key findings in an upcoming webinar and white paper, here are a couple of stats that stand out:
On-Page Job Seeker Behavior: Before Google for jobs, pages per visit were coming in at 3.47-3.48 for a typical Google Organic visit. After Google for Jobs, overall pages/visit shrunk about 0.2, while job seekers that landed on a job page actually grew by 0.04 pages/visit. This does make sense, as more job seekers are taking an “inside out” navigation approach. They’re landing on a deep job-level page and then navigating the site from there, as opposed to landing on the home page or a mid-level page, and then navigating down to find a job they’re interested in applying to.
New User Behavior: Since Google for Jobs launched, the percentage of new job seekers landing on a job-level page went up significantly from 38 percent to 50 percent. More new job seekers are landing directly on job-level pages from their search queries.
Apply Click Behavior: Since Google for Jobs launched, 35 percent of job seekers clicked the apply button, a 20 percent jump when looking at the data prior to Google for Jobs. This is a pretty big leap, and points toward Google accomplishing their stated goal of “better connecting job seekers to the jobs around them.”
Clearly, Google has found another important way to impact the lives of its users, and has the power to change the journey of a job seeker. Learn more by registering for the upcoming webinar and hear updates to the Google for Jobs search results over recent months, as well as the impact that Google for Jobs has had on job seeker behavior by measuring trends across tens of millions of visits.
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