Are the ways you search for jobs set to change ?

Is the increasing speed and comprehensiveness of Google’s indexing and ability to intelligently respond to complex Boolean search strings changing the job hunting landscape?

A number of people we’ve spoken to have suggested the first thing they do when looking for a new position online is to search the desired job title and location via Google. This usually brings up a well targeted response, often from job board aggregators like indeed.com or simplyhired showing appropriately titled vacancies which best match your desired location. Naturally this works best if you have a particular role type in mind and a good recruiter should be considering natural search when writing their adverts anyway, to best cover a number of suitable bases.

So this led us to thinking, how relevant are individual job boards going to be in the future if the big search firms like Google, alongside global job aggregator sites are fast becoming the initial referrer of indirect traffic? In our minds the candidate journey will evolve to become:

Google
l
Job aggregator sites
l
Original career site
l
Application Received

So it begs the question, if this is a trend on the rise, will recruitment agencies need to advertise on multiple job sites in the future? Will candidates still go in search for specialist industry job boards? Or will they grow to become more trusting of Google and other search engines to deliver up-to-date, comprehensive results more quickly and effectively wthout the need to go hunting across every job site?

We have created a quick Poll on LinkedIn to try and gain further insight into this and understand if it is an emerging trend, or if the traditional channels still win through. You can access the poll here http://linkd.in/xzr8wb

Check back here for the results at a later date.