Is Google About to Enter the Job Market?

$400 billion dollar market… and it’s inefficient… Am I crazy to think Google is poised to make a major play in the recruitment industry?

Google is positioned to enter the job market because… (1) the internet is already writing job ads they way they want them to, (2) there are 540+ million Google+ profiles, (3) ‘Magnet’ is one of the best candidate management softwares in the known universe, and (4) they may know who knows and influences who based on email activity.

(1) Schema.org is the authority for how to mark up your pages in order to speak fluently to the mighty search engine. Without much notoriety, job posting schema emerged to help veterans find a job (SmartRecruiters jobs are SEO optimized for this). There are only 25 terms in the schema intangible category, including areas where Google has made recent product developments, such as ‘Order’ and ‘Parcel Delivery.’

(2) Google+ – and to a lesser degree, Google Authorship –  have made serious efforts to host the average internet users’ public facing profile page. This could be the candidate profile. Imagine, if you are logged into Google you could express interest in working for a company just by visiting their site…

(3) I’ve heard, Magnet is the name of Google’s internal candidate management software. I’ve also heard that the employees love it, which – before SmartRecruiters 🙂 – was uncommon for any user to say of his or her recruiting software. (Read more in “What Makes Google’s ATS the Best?”) If they already have the best employer facing product to manage a business’ hiring activity, entering the market is a whole lot easier.

(4) 24.5% of all hires come from referrals. Since Google has the email addresses and names of everyone who uses Gmail, they have quite the talent base of who knows who and who influences who – should they choose to start matching people to jobs and jobs to people.

But of course there is other business for Google to attend to. Here’s a look at the other side of the coin:

Google is NOT positioned to enter the job market because…

(1) just because there’s a schema for it doesn’t mean Google makes a product for it, (2) Google+ has not won the market for professional online identity, (3) releasing ‘Magnet’ to the public is giving up a competitive advantage in the war for talent, (4), and is entering another market really necessary?

You know what I’m searching for, but do you know who I want to hire. See you out there Google!