Everybody wants the secret sauce, tricks, and short cuts to drive better and quicker hires.
In this episode of VOICES Venkat Janapareddy talks: - Tricks and secret sauce - Pay transparency - Recruitment Marketing Platforms and more...
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Morgan: Voices, we hear them every day. Some voices like mine are smooth and comforting. While on the other hand, The Chad and Cheese Podcast is like listening to a Nickelback album. You rather stab yourself in the ears with an ice pick. Anyway, you're now listening to Voices, a podcast series from Chad and Cheese, that features the most important and influential voices within the recruitment industry. Try not to fuck it up boys.
Chad: Companies are always bitching and moaning of how they are not showing up first in Google for Jobs, but yet they don't want to put the salary or they don't want to put some of the different pieces of information that Google wants, because that's better for the actual user experience for the job seeker. How do you help those companies understand or how do you provoke them into a conversation around putting salary information in a job because that's going to help their rankings.
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Chad: Welcome back. We're picking the conversation up with entrepreneur and CEO of Jobiak, Venkat Janapareddy.
Joel: I want to go back to the question of have more robust content on your landing page or your job description page. Do you think that the value is coming from just having more content or is the value from I'm a job seeker, I click on LinkedIn or wherever and my engagement is higher because there's more content and things that I can do or learn from that page. Or if it's both of those things, do you have any sense of dividing which one is weighted more or which one is more important?
Chad: So it has to be relevant. I mean it has to be hyper-relevant really, right?
Venkat: Not only hyper-relevant, it even gives more preference if there's similar jobs on Google for Jobs. If they're not, so you show them 10 of really good similar jobs and those guys are not on Google for Jobs. It still is good, it's better than nothing. But if those 10 jobs are also on Google for Jobs, then you automatically rank higher. Now how Google calculates similar jobs is basically very, very, it's secret sauce. Basically if you go to LinkedIn or Glassdoor, they show similar jobs. But the way Google likes it is they've got their own internal database based on how this is. They have kind of a relationship between all these job titles. They got this 20 million job title and skills knowledge graph. They have to believe that they are similar.
Venkat: If they don't believe they are similar, then you are going to get penalized. They think you are keyword stuffing. It's a very typical hardcore SEO 101 intense. The jobs you're producing, so one of the things we do, how we find out the similar jobs is we basically went to Google and looked at 30 million jobs, searched for 500,000 titles across dozen cities. And we looked at how Google thinks about these jobs. How does it look at similar jobs, and as it is, similar jobs and meta keywords, same thing with meta keywords. If you put in additional information, again with our keyword stuffing, Google likes it, especially this is a really good tip for your listeners.
Venkat: If you are in low population cities, especially let's say towns that have very few jobs, Google really likes anything additional information, it actually uses that for ranking jobs. But if you're in Boston and you have thousands and thousands of sales jobs, sometimes it just goes by with the schema. But in low popular cities, any additional information you provide, whether it's meta-tags, similar jobs, category. Category plays a huge role. Many people must be thinking, why does LinkedIn on the landing page put a category? Google doesn't say anything about schema providing a category.
Venkat: But let's say most people, now Google for Jobs provides what keywords that people are using on Google. So you get an idea and then you're showing up on search results. A lot of times these guys use, hey, jobs near me, nursing jobs near me, construction jobs. The category plays a huge role. If you put the category on the job landing page and also the schema doesn't have a category, but if you can put it in Google accepts that. Even the Google only talks about nine different schema points, but it accepts up to 60 of them. I'm only telling you one of them, but the rest of them are our secret sauce. But category plays a huge role. So the list goes on, especially little, little things, having links to your social sites makes a difference. Location base, which we'll talk about in a second, but it's become an optimization SEO.
Joel: Do you have a sense for how much, like say bookmarking a job or sharing it on social media or somewhere else has on ranking?
Venkat: Yeah. Anytime you have that linking that someone else is referencing how Indeed got popular. Indeed never publishes any of the landing pages. They do all these listing pages. They say, hey, Boston sales jobs, or Boston construction job. They show up number two today and then you click on any of that, they go onto a landing page and from there you go to the actual detail page. That's the essence of SEO. And anytime you share the social media, the blog, anytime you have all this backlinks referencing jobs, especially the referencing blogs on sites and socials that have good authority, you tend to do much better than not having any type of backlinks.
Chad: Companies are always bitching and moaning of how they are not showing up first in Google for Jobs, but yet they don't want to put the salary or they don't want to put some of the different pieces of information that Google wants because that's better for the actual user experience for the job seeker. How do you help those companies understand or how do you provoke them into a conversation around putting salary information in a job because that's going to help their rankings.
Venkat: Yeah. Salary plays a huge role, but 90% of jobs on Google for Jobs don't have salary. We encourage our customers to put in the salary, if not salary now Google has done a good job of if you partner with Glassdoor or Salary.com, at least put an estimated salary which they did a good job. You tend to do well, but convincing employers, it's a complicated problem. Some people feel that as a leverage to negotiating the interview process, but we got past that, putting the estimated salary will help you. Again, partner with any of these companies who does estimate, that is as good as putting the actual salary. But it's not good for a job seeker, obviously job seeker wants to know the actual salary.
Chad: It's a band-aid.
Venkat: Yeah, it's a band-aid. It's a long battle. Employers don't like it, but that's not something we are trying to ... we try our best with our customers. But again, by the time you get the jobs which is in the little feed, it's a complicated process.
Chad: So much bullshit, right? We can put a man on the moon, but we can't change a goddamn job description. I'm going to go down a rabbit hole real quick. I mean, we're talking about pay equity overall for individuals, and that's a big topic right now. A lot of it has to do with transparency because companies aren't transparent about what they're paying people today, which is one of the reasons why we don't see salaries because of quote unquote negotiation. Well, there is no negotiation if you know the fairness, you know what's going to be paid. From your standpoint, you're in this industry with us and I'm sure you hear a lot of this going on. Do you believe that transparency is directly linked to pay equity? And if so, should we be moving in the transparency direction?
Venkat: Yes and no. When I used to work for Deloitte way back, for certain positions it ranges anywhere from 60,000 to 120,000. A lot of things come into play, especially if you're graduating from top 10 colleges, that automatically puts you at least 30% more there.
Chad: Laszlo Bock who was at Google says that's all bullshit.
Venkat: No, but actually it does matter. If you look at Google, I'm sure they don't go to every single college, they have
Chad: No, I'm talking about top 10 colleges. They don't even focus on top 10 colleges anymore, because they actually have data that demonstrates that the individual's not coming from top 10 colleges are outperforming the others.
Venkat: That may be true. Google is different, they're tech savvy. But if you look at in general based on, again, my experience working, this is 15 years back. There's always that gap, how to bridge that gap a lot depends on candidate to be honest, it's how you negotiate. I see even ... I work at a WeWork place, we have 200 start-ups. In every role that we have, the salaries are significantly different and the company is different. It depends on how you negotiate, how much demand you are in especially right now if you are a tech, the demand is ridiculous. Even graduates from colleges who are entering tech jobs are getting $90,000 to $100,000.
Chad: But that's different from a Fortune 500 company. I mean because you really have to split this up and start at the top, right? Because that's where a good amount of the jobs are, and that's where really the standard should be set. If we're talking about Fortune 500 companies, the ones that you're working with, the ones that Google wants to see salary on their jobs, don't you think that's a good place to start?
Venkat: It is. I wish they can put in the salary so it's pretty transparent for all the candidates, but we have tried. We didn't, of course, an year back we didn't know a lot of the secrets that Google is looking at it, of course then everyone thought only salary is the key. But we have many other factors that do well. But to your point, we are trying, but unfortunately we're a small fish and a start-up. We try our best, but it's a very difficult problem to tackle in terms of convincing employers to put the salary on the postings.
Chad: Got you. So try to divert back to what we were talking about a little bit SEO, but also another acronym, RMP, Recruitment Marketing Platform. Do you think that, and is it like your stance that it is smart for every company, especially these big organizations with tons of jobs to have a recruitment marketing platform because that is the cosmetic and/or designed for Google platform, which the applicant tracking system is not? Should they have both?
Venkat: Absolutely. I think RMP is the whole career sites. The concept of job ads.
Chad: Like the experience, right?
Venkat: Yeah, the whole experience. Candidates are starting to go to career sites, more and more job seekers really want to know more about the company and the culture and benefits and all that. You don't get a lot of that LinkedIn job ads. RMPs especially we are starting to work with Phenom and those guys, they do a phenomenal job really building solid career sites. And it's not just Google, everywhere else, it's not just for Google for Jobs. You have a good career site, the organic search is going to pick up. Some of our customers get more traffic from Google organic than Google for Jobs. Before Google for Jobs your career sites never got any traffic. Because you type sales jobs or even you type Microsoft jobs or IBM jobs, the first page is always job ads. But now Google for Jobs, every single job you publish in Google for Job, they also show up in organic, but there's a trick to it, how to certain area as lots of people look for company by job.
Venkat: If you're looking for UT Health East Texas job or Microsoft jobs, you now see actually all of Google for Jobs on the organic. As a result, some of our customers are getting almost 30% to 50% of the traffic from organic. And RMPs are really shining there, that's where it's not about schema. If you want traffic from organic you don't need to have Google for Job schema. That's very glad to have good landing page, not only for summary of a career site but benefits, details, additional information. I really like this concept of RMPs and building this career sites and investing, because that's basically the future. I think job seekers are always going to go to career sites and company as opposed to job ads. We've been helping some of these RMPs and we're seeing good there.
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