Cheezhead Recruiting News and Opinion

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I found a free moment today to post a few jobs on Google Base and came up with a few reasons for employers to love Google’s new offering:

1. It’s FREE. Upload job content on the Web’s top search engine at no cost? Sign me up.

2. It’s Google. Traffic, brand awareness, technology, Wall Street valuations, brain power and a cool quotient that makes all others bow down.

3. Post one job or 1,000. Google Base enables a mom-and-pop, one-hire-a-year operation post a job just as easily as the largest company in the world who most likely will post via regular feeds.

4. Job content is served by relevancy. Seeing postings in date order is very limiting. A nursing job posted at 8 a.m. is typically on Page 4 by the end of the day. Serving up jobs with the help of Google’s "secret sauce" search technology will help the cream rise to the top.

(Yes, I fully expect the strategy of optimizing job descriptions to gain in importance and for this to be very good for companies like mine.)

5. Listings searchable by location. This makes it better for both job seeker and employer. A cool enhancement would be for Google to give employers the option to only make their postings visible to IP addresses within a specified radius.

6. Mapping. Job seekers can map out where employers are. Need directions to your interview? No problem. Plus, cut your gas prices by finding a job closer to you.

7. Spam policed. Google Base enables users to police job content by reporting those who are behaving badly. Spam, scammers, multiple-posters, whatever will be given the smack down.

8. Listings filtered by employer, education, type, education and/or function. Putting the power into the hands of the user as opposed to spoon feeding them, job seekers can breakdown their search in a multitude of ways.

9. Add your logo, build your brand. The search results page displays company logos (or whatever photo you want to use) with your job listing. I can’t stress how important this should be. Why build CareerBuilder’s brand when you can build your own?

10. Anonymize your contact e-mail. Maybe considered common, quite a few niche sites haven’t figured out that hiding an employer’s e-mail address is important. With Google Base, never fear e-mail spam.

11. Customize contact information. Different recruiters to contact for different jobs? No problem.

12. Customize location information. Different offices for different openings? No problem.

13. Drive traffic to you. Sending job seekers to a job board where your competition resides is far inferior to driving eyeballs to your own brand and your jobs only.

14. Post anywhere from 1-31 days. Sure, you can delete your ad before the expiration on most job sites, but how many allow you to set the time that your job is listed ahead of time?

15. Did I mention it’s FREE and Google?

Yes, I know a lot of these functions aren’t exclusive to Google, but the culmination of all of them under the umbrella of Google make for a very formidable offering.

From 30,000 feet, posting jobs on Google Base is very much like Craigslist, so if you’re familiar with posting on Craig, you’ll have no problems with Google’s new solution. The major variable is adding Google’s search technology (and brand) into the mix.

Additionally, I fully expect Google Base to get better over time and slowly integrate this content with Google’s market leading, incredibly popular Web search.

That said, I’m pretty confident the 15 reasons above are enough to motivate employers to get on board. I mean, what is there to lose?

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