Job seeking may get a little more consolidated in the coming months, with Google for Jobs the latest tool to be developed by the Sundar Pichai-led tech giant.
Google’s I/O two weeks ago was one of the more revealing of recent times, with a whole swathe of new tools and initiatives released.
There was news on how much AMP is improving our mobile browsing, with pages loading twice as fast as when it launched only a few months ago.
There’s a new GIF tool for journalists and storytellers, and hotel rankings will soon be hosted directly in the Google search engine.
And it’s within the search engine that we will stay, for now, with Google for Jobs a particularly interesting project.
On stage at I/O, Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, explained how the company is launching a jobs search engine in the US, with roles ranging from entry-level service industry to high-end professional.
Utilising Google’s machine learning and AI platforms, the new search engine will seek to better understand how jobs are classified and related. Pichai said that it will include a feature that collects and organises the millions of postings from all over the web to tailor them for jobseekers.
And reports have now emerged of Google for Jobs already out in the wild, though only in a select number of cases.
Android Police has revealed just how this new tool looks, with an example of ‘barista jobs’ displayed with the full Google for Jobs treatment.
When revealing the tool at I/O, Pichai said 46pc of US employers face talent shortages and yet, there is a disconnect between employers and jobseekers.
“The challenge of connecting jobseekers to better information on job availability is like many search challenges we’ve solved in the past,” Pichai said.
Google’s moves are becoming more and more straightforward. Are there areas of the internet better suited to Google than hotel booking and job seeking, for example?
Left: current layout. Centre, right: new layout. Image: Android Police
“It’s inspiring to see how AI is starting to bear fruit that people can actually taste,” he said.
“There is still a long way to go before we are truly an AI-first world, but the more we can work to democratise access to the technology – both in terms of the tools people can use and the way we apply it – the sooner everyone will benefit.”
Google. Image: tongcom photographer/Shutterstock
