Improve The Visibility Of The Jobs On Your Corporate Websites’ Careers With Structured Data

Having your own careers section is a great way to drive down the cost of recruitment, however you may not be getting much visibility across your jobs to really drive in your candidates. Implementing structure data to job postings is a great way to allow 3rd party websites to pick up and list your jobs easily, primarily Google Jobs.

Structured data for jobs is not particularly difficult to implement as long as all of the atomic bits of information about your job are easy enough to account for. 

Meeting The Minimum Requirements

There are some minimal requirements for what makes an acceptable job listing, so before you attempt to implement any structured data you must make sure that you are already collecting the following data:

• Job Title
• Job Description
• Date Posted
• Valid Until Date
• Employment Type
• Hiring Organisation (often your own company)
• Name
• Website
• Logo
• Location Details
• Base Salary
• Currency
• Payment Frequency (i.e. annually or weekly etc)

These are the minimum requirements for a simple job, however if you post jobs with different properties then you may need to supply more information. For example, listing a job as “remote” still requires a physical location where the job is based. If you have multiple locations you may need to list all of these. 

If you do not have the data available you will have to amend your job creation process to ensure these details are being collected so they can be used.

Structure Data Benefits For Job Postings

There are various reason to implement structured data:

• Interactive job listings on 3rd party sites: by having the individual items available for 3rd party sites to pick up they can make their listings far more accurate and increase the experience on their end, for example Google can feature your logo, reviews, job ratings and individual details.
• Better candidate matching: by making your job structure clearer 3rd party sites can implement filtering options that mean the users finding your job are doing so because they used more of the filters to find exactly what you are offering.
• Better conversions: when the experience is more customised and specific to the user searching they are more likely to take up your offer and start an application.

Better Performance Through More Job Posting Attributes

While the minimum requirements will cover the shape of most jobs, if you can be more detailed you are likely to appear in more searches. For example if a user is searching for jobs that have a requirement for a bachelor's degree which they hold but you have not specified this then your job may be filtered out in that search even if it would have been relevant. 

You should speak to your development team to get an understanding of which attributes are available and relevant for your industry of work to get the maximum potential out of Google job postings.

Restrictions To Be Aware Of By Google

In a similar way to how SEO works, you need to be keeping on the right side of what Google considers acceptable. Where Google is currently the authority on what job posting data should look like you are pretty safe to just go by their policies and feel confident that all other 3rd party sites will follow.

• Irrelevant content is not allowed, make sure that you are only using job posting markup to highlight jobs, if you use it to highlight content within your site it will not be included.
• Partial or missing content is not sufficient to make a listing, while this seems straight forward if your website has a maximum character limit on your job description you may accidentally cut this off early and fall foul of this policy.
• Falsifying information is also not allowed, you cannot modify your data to appear as though you are posting as another company, or seen to be stuffing keywords into job descriptions. 

Common Sense Restrictions

There are various other restrictions that apply but fall into the realm of common sense. Clearly anything malicious, untrue, illegal, outdated or misrepresented is not tolerated. For more information you should consult Google’s page on Job Postings