The Jobs problem is not search problem (i.e. it isn't difficult to discover available jobs) but rather a trust problem. In this setting you have suppliers and consumers with many to many relationship.
The good supplier doesn't want to spend their energy in reviewing vast quantity of available consumers. At the same time good consumers don't want to go after every available suppliers. There is also good likelyhood that bad suppliers as well as bad consumers are trying to masquerade as good ones. This is the same setting as dating website or Amazon product website. The solution that humans seem to prefer is somehow build the trust model. In case of Amazon product website, you look at reviews and ratings by others. In case of dating website you look at characteristics that you have learned to trust such as what's in the photos, what person is doing for living, what degrees do they have and so on. In case of jobs, companies look at who is referring to who or if you are already at other top company (which is the reason why most people get jobs because of referrals, not by posting resumes). The trust model is developed individually and can massively be different from person to person.
I'm in fact more certain that virtually all companies ignore resumes posted on their website and most interviews happen solely because recruiter actively identified candidate from other similar company/university or referrals. However this may be more true in skilled jobs.
I know you're use "search" in the sense of search engine, but there's a branch of economics called search theory, and matching job hunters to employers is a canonical example.
If you consider that both parties (job hunters and employers) must locate each other and agree on each other then you enter the realm of matching theory.
There's a great book on this called "Who Gets What—and Why". The book talks about lots of matching markets: job hunting, school selection, kidney exchange, etc. It talks about the reasons why these markets work and how we might improve them.
What you describe sounds exactly like a "search" problem.
Employers need a way to search through the many applicants for people worth interviewing. Today they use heuristics (like referrals) to make filtering easier. There might be better ways to do filtering.
As an employee, it isn't easy for me to list all job openings within 15 minutes of my home today.
You're wrong because you can't even get to the "search problem", many of the current popular job boards are such unusable garbage that it's effectively impossible to wade through them and apply to jobs without inadvertently having your data stolen or spyware installed, it's that terrible. Something like monster.com or dice.com is more dangerous than the deep web at this point.
As much as I hate Google, someone has to come along and become the authority to put these all in one place and hopefully drive all these terrible sites/recruiters out of business.
"...but rather a trust problem. In this setting you have suppliers and consumers with many to many relationship."
The key word here is relationship. As in relationship management.
What, where are CRM equivalents for recruiting, interviewing, onboarding, etc? Does everyone roll their own? Or just done manually, ad hoc?
Is this a service that indeed.com or competitors could provide to their customers (both sides)?
---
My team has been actively interviewing. My current employer's HR/recruiting is better than most places I've seen. Even so, it's still opaque. After we do our bit, we have no idea what happens to our candidates.
Without any feedback, the whole exercise feels pointless. For both sides.
God spare me for saying this, because I hate JIRA with the passion of billion imploding stars, but we need some kind of candidate tracking system, perhaps modeled after issue trackers, coupled with some basic CRM features (call log, tickle reminders, etc).
Looks like Indeed sold in 2012, for 1 billion. I would bet it would've sold for much much more if they sold it later (at peak "unicorn" hype), but this is easy to say in hindsight.
Google has said numerous times they don't want to get involved in any further steps of the job applicant process more than they are with this search tool.
True, however, Google is facing more and more pressure from regulators for favoring their own services in search. The EU is expected to drop a massive penalty in the next month or two for Google favoring their own shopping services over others, and surely implement new restrictions on how they can conduct themselves in this regard.
I think its very disingenuous to use the reputation of the article to also push for a " no skills shortage in technology" view. The original article is well researched and based on facts, whereas the blog posts you link are not.
LinkedIn has always stayed close to my heart. I'm currently on my third job, and I found all of them through LinkedIn. But I find it incredibly hard to like their new UI. They try hard to look like Facebook, when they really have no reason to do so. LinkedIn messaging is supposed to be professional messaging like email, but they turned it into a chat window. The "news feed" used to be useful and relevant, now I see memes and irrelevant sponsored posts. I try to check the site at least once a day, and in the past 3-4 weeks I find myself leave the site in less than 30 seconds. The home page is so heavy that you can almost feel it. I deleted my facebook account recently for some reasons, and I find the exact same reasons on LinkedIn now.
this won't have any bearing on linkedin because they see themselves as a (professional) social network, not a jobs site (even though recruiting is a decent chunk of revenue).
jobs seem to be a natural extension of google's search service, and a direct competitive response to indeed. these job search results will be useful to people but i don't see it changing the industry. discovery is an important step in getting a job but it's only one step.
(i say this as someone working on the matching problem between employers and employees.)
This sounds amazing. I honestly think recruiters can be entirely replaced by a decent A.I. and good scheduling software. And we would all be better off.
Noooo!! Recruiters are so useful. They do a lot of leg work for you. They have access to many openings that aren't public. They can provide introductions to people you've always wanted to speak to. And they can convince good companies to create an opening for you if you would fit really well with the company.
I get to send my resume to a few recruiters and they call me with all the openings that fit my skill set and i would be interested in. They make looking for a new position so much easier. Often they work in teams so you get multiple people doing this for you at the same time. Plus you build a relationship with them, their team, and the company so you with them better next time too.
They are invaluable.
I do have to say though that there is enormous variability in their skill. The secret is to only work with a few that have access to different contacts and that you trust. Don't spray your resume out there to bad recruiting companies.
I have noticed a difference between industries though. In my main industry (finance and financial technology) recruiters tend to be very knowledgeable and work very diligently to give you leads that fit your skills and priorities. I've noticed that in other industries like web or internet start up they can be atrocious. I get all sorts of random crap from them so you probably need to be extra careful in certain industries.
But i would never give up my recruiters. They take a lot of pain out of me trying to find a new position.
I have a lot of love for my recruiters. I wouldn't have nearly the career i do now without them.
Uh no, Google is an advertising company. You know the terrible full page creepy ads taking over mobile that make the internet almost unusable and you can't block? Google is responsible for that.
With Google Jobs you're the product to be sold. Only this time it's not annoying ad's, they're offering your employment for sale, your life.
I agree-ish. A good solution needs to happen. I've been happy with Hired from both sides.
Recruiters are getting vile. Recently one contacted a friend and told my buddy that I had referred him. My buddy hit me up after the call mad that I'd told a recruiter he was looking.
I'd never met the recruiter but he'd added me on LI at some point in the past.
My initial reaction using Google Jobs search compared to LinkedIn:
- Not enough jobs. LinkedIn seems to have more jobs posted for the things I searched for. While many recruiters still post to Indeed, Glassdoor, ZipRecruiter etc... The beef of postings, from my experience, is found on LinkedIn.
- Not easy to apply. LinkedIn has the ability to more easily apply. Yes, one could argue this is a bad thing (since companies get spammed with candidates) but I think with AI a lot of bad candidates could get filtered out more easily.
- No social network. Since so many professionals use LinkedIn, it's easier to find people you know who work at a company you are applying for.
I think this is a long, long way to beating LinkedIn for job search.
I wonder if the end goal here is for Google to start selling "Promoted Jobs" advertisements.
I'm also a little concerned if this gets popular that competitors jobs will happen to be further down the list than they should be, but that's probably just my paranoia.
I don't think you're being paranoid enough; the end goal here is for Google to be the biggest and best source of every kind of information anyone would ever want, ever.
I'm sure they will do promoted jobs. But I wonder if this is more of a defensive move against job related ads that are stagnant - they're trying to do something similar to what they did with the hotel booking: to encourage higher all around bidding from the ecosystem on ads (or find new revenue stream) by putting competition on the intermediaries (ota) that were outbidding the orignators (hotels) for keywords about the originators.
Does Google have a deal with these companies? Will this be the start of the end of all those job sites? is Google just testing the waters? So many questions.
It's like Indeed (in the early days, when they didn't have post jobs/resume search).
I guess it's possible they could build google apps type thing for recruiters eventually and step on everyone, although it's doubtful it will do them much good to get into that field.
I tried out the example in the post and didn't get any of the contextualized information. Guess it isn't rolled out to everyone yet or do you have to sign up somewhere to see it?
OK google, now find me an employer that wants to pay more...
Kudos to google, hopefully this helps majority of America find jerbs.
most hackernews readers think this is stupid because our industry has different problems. Our jobs problem is:
- "employers often lie because they want to pay less than a typical employee is worth"
but also at the same time:
- "applicants often lie about their experiences and such"
So there are 4 quadrants: honest/dishonest applicants and honest/dishonest employers and where they overlap is small.
Not sure I like this. The reason I tend to use external job sites is that they don't know who I am so I don't have to spend three weeks beating off recruiters with a shitty stick. Google knows who I am.
I'm on mobile so I'm posting a bunch of unsourced crap right now, apologies, but when I read this this morning, the employee interviewed said along the lines of "just because you like fishing doesn't mean you want to be a fisherman."
Basically google will not be using prior knowledge about you to drive jobs search results. The results will be literally based off your search string (and applied filters) alone.
I wonder if this means that instead of applying across numerous - way too many - career/job search sites (and filling in the same thing over and over again)...that maybe I can just fill stuff out once, and be done...and let the "machines" do the work for me? ;-)
These large companies can and do use lock-in with their tools to shape people's lives the way they want. This is the extreme end of where Google wants to be, I hope I'll never end up having to use any more of the things they develop.
[+] [-] sytelus|8 years ago|reply
The good supplier doesn't want to spend their energy in reviewing vast quantity of available consumers. At the same time good consumers don't want to go after every available suppliers. There is also good likelyhood that bad suppliers as well as bad consumers are trying to masquerade as good ones. This is the same setting as dating website or Amazon product website. The solution that humans seem to prefer is somehow build the trust model. In case of Amazon product website, you look at reviews and ratings by others. In case of dating website you look at characteristics that you have learned to trust such as what's in the photos, what person is doing for living, what degrees do they have and so on. In case of jobs, companies look at who is referring to who or if you are already at other top company (which is the reason why most people get jobs because of referrals, not by posting resumes). The trust model is developed individually and can massively be different from person to person.
I'm in fact more certain that virtually all companies ignore resumes posted on their website and most interviews happen solely because recruiter actively identified candidate from other similar company/university or referrals. However this may be more true in skilled jobs.
[+] [-] richdougherty|8 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_theory
If you consider that both parties (job hunters and employers) must locate each other and agree on each other then you enter the realm of matching theory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matching_theory_(economics)
There's a great book on this called "Who Gets What—and Why". The book talks about lots of matching markets: job hunting, school selection, kidney exchange, etc. It talks about the reasons why these markets work and how we might improve them.
http://www.hmhbooks.com/whogetswhat/
Note that trust is an important component of a functioning market.
[+] [-] wsetchell|8 years ago|reply
Employers need a way to search through the many applicants for people worth interviewing. Today they use heuristics (like referrals) to make filtering easier. There might be better ways to do filtering.
As an employee, it isn't easy for me to list all job openings within 15 minutes of my home today.
[+] [-] 65827|8 years ago|reply
As much as I hate Google, someone has to come along and become the authority to put these all in one place and hopefully drive all these terrible sites/recruiters out of business.
[+] [-] specialist|8 years ago|reply
The key word here is relationship. As in relationship management.
What, where are CRM equivalents for recruiting, interviewing, onboarding, etc? Does everyone roll their own? Or just done manually, ad hoc?
Is this a service that indeed.com or competitors could provide to their customers (both sides)?
---
My team has been actively interviewing. My current employer's HR/recruiting is better than most places I've seen. Even so, it's still opaque. After we do our bit, we have no idea what happens to our candidates.
Without any feedback, the whole exercise feels pointless. For both sides.
God spare me for saying this, because I hate JIRA with the passion of billion imploding stars, but we need some kind of candidate tracking system, perhaps modeled after issue trackers, coupled with some basic CRM features (call log, tickle reminders, etc).
[+] [-] askvictor|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] a5seo|8 years ago|reply
Any business that depends on putting their own search results inside of Google's is going to be a target of "forward integration."
[+] [-] halflings|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trca|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ocdtrekkie|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Futurebot|8 years ago|reply
"At the same time, 46 percent of U.S. employers face talent shortages and have issues filling open positions with the right candidate."
"Talk of a skills gap in the labor market is 'an incredible cop out'":
http://www.businessinsider.com/no-skills-gap-in-labor-market...
Doubly so for technology:
http://www.greenvilleonline.com/story/opinion/contributors/2...
https://medium.com/i-m-h-o/stem-still-no-shortage-c6f6eed505...
[+] [-] pm90|8 years ago|reply
I think its very disingenuous to use the reputation of the article to also push for a " no skills shortage in technology" view. The original article is well researched and based on facts, whereas the blog posts you link are not.
[+] [-] naturalgradient|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ctrlaltdestroy|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] QML|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] clairity|8 years ago|reply
jobs seem to be a natural extension of google's search service, and a direct competitive response to indeed. these job search results will be useful to people but i don't see it changing the industry. discovery is an important step in getting a job but it's only one step.
(i say this as someone working on the matching problem between employers and employees.)
[+] [-] aphextron|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jnordwick|8 years ago|reply
I get to send my resume to a few recruiters and they call me with all the openings that fit my skill set and i would be interested in. They make looking for a new position so much easier. Often they work in teams so you get multiple people doing this for you at the same time. Plus you build a relationship with them, their team, and the company so you with them better next time too.
They are invaluable.
I do have to say though that there is enormous variability in their skill. The secret is to only work with a few that have access to different contacts and that you trust. Don't spray your resume out there to bad recruiting companies.
I have noticed a difference between industries though. In my main industry (finance and financial technology) recruiters tend to be very knowledgeable and work very diligently to give you leads that fit your skills and priorities. I've noticed that in other industries like web or internet start up they can be atrocious. I get all sorts of random crap from them so you probably need to be extra careful in certain industries.
But i would never give up my recruiters. They take a lot of pain out of me trying to find a new position.
I have a lot of love for my recruiters. I wouldn't have nearly the career i do now without them.
[+] [-] throwasehasdwi|8 years ago|reply
With Google Jobs you're the product to be sold. Only this time it's not annoying ad's, they're offering your employment for sale, your life.
[+] [-] ep103|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] odammit|8 years ago|reply
Recruiters are getting vile. Recently one contacted a friend and told my buddy that I had referred him. My buddy hit me up after the call mad that I'd told a recruiter he was looking.
I'd never met the recruiter but he'd added me on LI at some point in the past.
[+] [-] tanilama|8 years ago|reply
Algorithms aren't person though, and they are ruthless.
[+] [-] gehwartzen|8 years ago|reply
Personally I wish we could go back to companies/managers/HR doing the actual applicant filtering.
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Florin_Andrei|8 years ago|reply
Fun game: find all jobs that could replace "recruiters" in the paragraph quoted above.
[+] [-] clairity|8 years ago|reply
regardless of that, i share the same privacy concerns others have about google, so don't see this as a particularly enticing announcement.
[+] [-] k2xl|8 years ago|reply
- Not enough jobs. LinkedIn seems to have more jobs posted for the things I searched for. While many recruiters still post to Indeed, Glassdoor, ZipRecruiter etc... The beef of postings, from my experience, is found on LinkedIn. - Not easy to apply. LinkedIn has the ability to more easily apply. Yes, one could argue this is a bad thing (since companies get spammed with candidates) but I think with AI a lot of bad candidates could get filtered out more easily. - No social network. Since so many professionals use LinkedIn, it's easier to find people you know who work at a company you are applying for.
I think this is a long, long way to beating LinkedIn for job search.
[+] [-] sna1l|8 years ago|reply
I'm also a little concerned if this gets popular that competitors jobs will happen to be further down the list than they should be, but that's probably just my paranoia.
[+] [-] mundo|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seoseokho|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GrumpyNl|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Consultant32452|8 years ago|reply
~Google AI
[+] [-] amelius|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sheeshkebab|8 years ago|reply
I guess it's possible they could build google apps type thing for recruiters eventually and step on everyone, although it's doubtful it will do them much good to get into that field.
[+] [-] vinayan3|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SEJeff|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blairanderson|8 years ago|reply
Kudos to google, hopefully this helps majority of America find jerbs.
most hackernews readers think this is stupid because our industry has different problems. Our jobs problem is: - "employers often lie because they want to pay less than a typical employee is worth"
but also at the same time:
- "applicants often lie about their experiences and such"
So there are 4 quadrants: honest/dishonest applicants and honest/dishonest employers and where they overlap is small.
Niche job boards FTW
[+] [-] setq|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eliben|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] komali2|8 years ago|reply
Basically google will not be using prior knowledge about you to drive jobs search results. The results will be literally based off your search string (and applied filters) alone.
Edit: Found the article https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/20/google-launches-its-ai-pow...
[+] [-] wonderous|8 years ago|reply
My guess is this is a response to Microsoft buying LinkedIn.
[+] [-] kylestlb|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jorgemf|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] happy-go-lucky|8 years ago|reply
Isn't that being "nationalistic"? Can't you be universal? Come on, Google!
[+] [-] dctoedt|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dag11|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mxuribe|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] swiley|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mcovey|8 years ago|reply
Even if I paste the URL of the special jobs result page back into Firefox, I get redirected back to a standard Google results page.
https://www.google.com/search?q=jobs+near+me&ibp=htl;jobs
Edit: after running "forget about this site" in the history, it now works. I guess some cookie or account setting was blocking it.