Google for Jobs and Google Hire get all the attention, but the company’s job search API, which helps make search results on corporate career sites and job boards smarter, continues to be a focus. Today, Google Cloud Job Discovery, formerly Cloud Jobs API, enters beta. Launched in November 2016, the API has been deployed on more than 3,000 company career sites and job boards.
As part of the beta launch, Google is moving beyond job boards and corporate career sites to now include staffing agencies and applicant tracking systems. In addition, Google is introducing support for job search in over 100 different languages.
Vendors like CareerBuilder, Dice, and Jibe, as well as direct employers Johnson & Johnson, FedEx, and Health South were early adopters. “CareerBuilder will be able to layer our rich domain expertise over Google’s extensive search capabilities, opening the door to new efficiencies and opportunities for our business, clients, and users,” said CareerBuilder CEO Matt Ferguson at the time. “Working with Google will give us the backend framework that we can leverage as we accelerate our transition into a global HR software as a service provider and build our ecosystem.”
When I wrote about the initiative in June, it was on the heels of early success with Johnson & Johnson, being aided by vendor Jibe. Back then, Google said the API had connected over more than 4 million job seekers to jobs on the web, and that Johnson & Johnson has seen an 18 percent increase in job applicants per search and a nearly 25 percent increase in clickthrough rate on its career site.
Fast forward today, and Johnson & Johnson continues to see success. According to Google, Cloud Job Discovery has helped Johnson & Johnson increase the number of “high-quality applicants” for business critical roles by 41 percent, and increase career site clickthroughs by 45 percent.
“Transforming our career site with Jibe and Google Cloud Job Discovery directly impacts our ability to attract high-quality talent and hire those candidates faster,” said Sjoerd Gehring, global VP of talent acquisition at Johnson & Johnson. “Lots of people are looking for their dream job, and if it’s here at J&J, we want them to find it quickly and easily.”
“Jibe and Google make it easy for a large company to make a real difference in the candidate experience without investing a lot of time, money, or internal resources,” said Gehring in a case study highlighted on Google. “Now that we’re using Google Cloud Job Discovery, our career site search results are exponentially better.”
Moving onto working with applicant tracking systems and staffing firms is a natural evolution of the product. Early testers include Hays, a global professional recruiting group that placed 70,000 people in permanent jobs and over 240,000 people in temporary roles this year, and iCIMS, a well-known ATS.
“We are pleased to be working with Google Cloud on this innovative initiative,” said Steve Weston, chief information officer at Hays. “It is an incredibly exciting development for the industry and we have already seen some positive results in our trials in providing a more positive user experience through improved ratios of viewing jobs to apply and confirmation.”
“As the first ATS provider included in this beta program, we believe that Google’s powerful search and machine learning capabilities can be incredibly impactful by weaving them more deeply into the world of recruiting,” said Al Smith, vice president of technology at iCIMS. “Candidate experience is so critical to the success of every business, including our own, so we look forward to bringing this advanced functionality to our customers and introducing more powerful, next-generation job-searching tools to benefit both job seekers and employers.”
It’s worth noting this love affair with Google’s API may not last. APIs historically can bite those who integrate them into their own service in the ass. In the past, APIs from companies like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn have changed access on a dime, leaving developers in the lurch, and sometimes out of business altogether.
It’s also worth noting the fact that more applicant tracking systems plugging into Cloud Job Discovery poses a serious threat to job boards who are currently enjoying a spike in traffic via Google for Jobs. “As more ATS content becomes available to Google for Jobs, less and less job board content is going show up,” I wrote back in July. “Unless, of course, job boards pay for the exposure. Knowing how hooked they’ll be on the free traffic they’re getting now, paying for it tomorrow will be a foregone conclusion.”
Access to Cloud Job Discovery can be requested here.