Posted on Aug 14, 2020

Google Job Search Developer's Cheat Sheet

Google Job Search, aka Google for Jobs, has been around a couple of years now as the fancy-pants AI powered official job search platform for Google.

Demand for jobs, in particular work-from-home jobs is off the charts right now (see the graph below), so I thought I would put together a Google Job Search Developer's Cheat Sheet.

Getting Started

Eligibility

Only sites containing job postings (and video live-streaming) sites can currently use the Google Indexing API.

Hosting requirements

Hosting must be capable of regular crawling from Google. Low-end shared hosting may not be good enough.

JobPosting Structured Data

To get job postings listed you need to use JobPosting structured data.

Required properties

datePosted
description
hiringOrganization
jobLocation
title
validThrough

Recommended properties

applicantLocationRequirements
baseSalary
employmentType
identifier
jobLocationType

Example (using JSON-LD)

{ "@context" : "https://schema.org/", "@type" : "JobPosting", "title" : "Software Engineer", "description" : "<p>Google aspires to be an organization that reflects the globally diverse audience that our products and technology serve. We believe that in addition to hiring the best talent, a diversity of perspectives, ideas and cultures leads to the creation of better products and services.</p>", "identifier": { "@type": "PropertyValue", "name": "Google", "value": "1234567" }, "datePosted" : "2017-01-18", "validThrough" : "2017-03-18T00:00", "employmentType" : "CONTRACTOR", "hiringOrganization" : { "@type" : "Organization", "name" : "Google", "sameAs" : "http://www.google.com", "logo" : "http://www.example.com/images/logo.png" }, "jobLocation": { "@type": "Place", "address": { "@type": "PostalAddress", "streetAddress": "1600 Amphitheatre Pkwy", "addressLocality": ", Mountain View", "addressRegion": "CA", "postalCode": "94043", "addressCountry": "US" } }, "baseSalary": { "@type": "MonetaryAmount", "currency": "USD", "value": { "@type": "QuantitativeValue", "value": 40.00, "unitText": "HOUR" } } }

Indexing API

Step 1: Complete prerequisites:

Create a service account
Verify site ownership in Search Console
Get an access token

Step 2: Send requests to Google:

Update a URL
Remove a URL
Get the status of a request
Send batch indexing requests

Step 3: Check, and if necessary request more quota

XML Sitemap

You can also ping Google to let them know about new jobs using an XML sitemap and a GET request as follows - replacing the example URL with your own sitemap:

http://www.google.com/ping?sitemap=https://www.example.co.uk/example-sitemap.xml