Only Bad Recruiters Should Fear a Google for Jobs Apocalypse

Hear ye, hear ye. The Olde Towne of Recruitersville has received terrifying news from across yonder pond! Google has deployed its mighty forces and plans to lay siege to our humble £32 billion village. Alas, noble kinswomen and kinsmen, the end is nigh.

Your town crier suggests seeking new fields to ply thy trade – literally fields. For once Google for Jobs has torn recruitment asunder, you will have to turn to farming to earn a crust – again, literally. Bread crusts will be the only currency afforded pauper agencies in the wake of Google’s mighty coup d’état.

O, despair! Recruitmentville will fall like Pompeii, its reckoning fast, brutal, and everlasting.

Unless. Unless…

Those lucky enough to attend last week’s REC Marketing Forum were treated to a masterclass in brand growth by Addictivity’s Alex Faiers. Developing a brand narrative will be imperative for any growing recruitment business, he said.

But one forum attendee sought clarity about the imminent arrival of the Big G. What would Google for Jobs mean for the UK recruitment industry? And what’s the point of building a gorgeous brand and content strategy when the Bad Boys of Search are going to “change the game”?

What is Google doing?

The Google for Jobs methodology is simple. They plan to cut the chaff out of job searching, offering candidates highly-personlised results from simple Google searches.

UK candidates will soon be able to Google “hospitality jobs” and get exactly what they wanted – in theory. Because a hospitality job can include anything front of house to security, Google will use its AI and extensive filters to supply job seekers with the most relevant results.

Google is determined to crack the code on pairing jobs with the right candidates, CEO Sundar Pichai says.

"The challenge of connecting job seekers to better information on job availability is like many search challenges we've solved in the past.”

Why the recruiterpocolypse is on hold  

Doom merchants have predicted a ‘recruiterpocolypse’ so many times, it might as well be a catchphrase. (I, myself, plan to make a fortune hocking “Recruitment is Dead” t-shirts an Amazon.)

But an industry that crawled through a mile of sewage in 2008-09 and came out clean on the other side won’t be so easily crushed. 

Google for Jobs presents an exciting opportunity for recruitment marketers to up their game and – gasp – grow.

Recruitment is more than a means to an end. It provides a vital service for clients and candidates– and that’s the most operative of operative terms: service.

Recruitment guru Greg Savage is on point when he says recruitment isn’t about finding jobs; it’s seduction.

“…what we really need to be focusing on in our industry is what I call the Seduction Conversion Rate which means the recruiter hit-rate when approaching target candidates. The successful recruiter will be skilled at finding unique candidates (UC).

Clients will not pay us big fees to ‘screen’ candidates. That will be a given. The value will be in hunting down unique talent and bringing them to the hiring table.”

Seduction. Service. Satisfaction. These are three innately human qualities, delivered by innately human humans. Jobseekers will obviously enjoy the convenience of highly-tailored Google results, but only the smart recruiter will know what makes them happy.

People listen to people. People buy from people. People are the differentiator in the tangled web of AI, algorithms and personalised search.

But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t build a bunker

Google for Jobs is a thing to learn about, explore and add to your marketing mix. Many UK recruitment companies are playing with the US version of the product, in anticipation of its arrival later this year.

The nimble among the industry will have a marketing strategy ready to deploy the day Google for Jobs arrives. It won’t be the end of their world – nay, gentle sir and madam. It is only the beginning of something great.