New Google Search experience to connect SMEs with job seekers in India

To help firms, especially 51 million small and medium enterprises (SMEs), in India find a better workforce and vice versa, Google on Tuesday rolled out a new Search experience that will list relevant employment opportunities. Google Search will display job listings from several popular websites, online classifieds and companies. The users can access the new experience in English on Search app on Android and iOS operating systems.  "Companies, especially SMEs, are often unable to make their listings discoverable. This new job search experience powered by our partners and our open platform approach attempts to bridge this gap," Rajan Anandan, Vice President India and Southeast Asia, told reporters here. 

According to Google, in the fourth quarter of 2017, it saw more than a 45 per cent increase in the number of job search queries. "This number is continuously growing," Anandan said. Job seekers can use smart filters like location, type and the field in which they want a job to narrow down the results.  The experience lets the job seekers, search, save the listings, share them and even sign up for alerts. To help the larger ecosystem of job providers, Google has also released open documentation, which will assist organisations to make their job openings discoverable on this new search experience, using open structured schema.orgweb markup standards that Google supports.

Lauding the move, Amitabh Kant, CEO, NITI Aayog said this feature would help job seekers find better opportunities. "This is an age of disruption where technology will play an important part. With this feature, all white and blue-collar job seekers can find employemnet opportunities easily. This is a great service for finding jobs," Kant told the gathering. Google has partnered with several job search platform, including Microsoft-owned LinkedIn, QuikrJobs and Shine.com, among others, and integrated them with Search.

"By working with our many partners to integrate their comprehensive listing of jobs, and offering an open platform where any third-party job search board or direct employer and can now surface their jobs to a broader audience, we hope this new experience on Google will help make the job search simpler and more effective," explained Achint Srivastava from the Google Search Engineering team. Now when users search for "jobs near me," "jobs for freshers," or similar job-seeking queries, they will see a special module that can be expanded to a more immersive experience.

Srivastava said that Google will use algorithms to avoid duplication of jobs and this feature is different from Google Hire -- a recruiting app from Google. Last year, at its I/O annual developer conference in the US, the company launched "Google for Jobs" initiative that includes a feature in search that collects and organizes millions of job postings from all over the web to make them easier for job seekers to find.

"Google is determined to crack the code on matching available jobs with the right candidates," company CEO Sundar Pichai had said during the keynote address.