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Permalink Reply by Rosemary Reilman on July 18, 2007 at 9:36am

I do not currently, mostly because I'm at a branch office and don't have access to the info / files that I need to do a bulk upload. But I was wondering the same thing. I see that it looks like Careerbuilder does, or at least used to.

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Permalink Reply by Sam Morse on July 24, 2007 at 11:28am

You get a few click-throughs. I don't know about the quality. It's definately a growing thing. They are making it a bit more prominent when doing general searches. We've had some challenges setting up the feeds.

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Permalink Reply by Moray Souter on July 25, 2007 at 5:57am

Can someone briefly explain the principle of Google Base? Is it just another outlet for posting jobs?

From what you are saying it sounds interesting, if anyone can put the concept in a nutshell that would be great.

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Permalink Reply by mattmartone on July 25, 2007 at 9:45pm

@Moray -> The concept is a simple one.

A trend has developed over the past two years or so. Job seekers are more often running job and career related searches at the search engines(google, yahoo, msn etc.)

Google base is google's attempt to provide these seekers with the info they are looking for and keep them on google without having to invest in building a job board.

Its pretty smart, rather than build different sites for every different vertical of classified(jobs, apartments, autos etc.) google built a single site that accepts feeds for other sites that want to connect their jobs, apartments, autos etc with these searchers.

To be honest...(disclaimer; i work for yahoo) I have yet to see much traction with google base.

i could be wrong but i've used it plenty of times and i have never been compelled to return. In fact I usually avoid it.

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Permalink Reply by Rosemary Reilman on July 27, 2007 at 10:30am

I'd probably have to agree with matt on his reaction to Base. I've posted a couple of our job fair events in both events and jobs sections and none of them got much traffic... And I'm not talking just clicks, I'm talking views in general.

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Permalink Reply by Moray Souter on July 26, 2007 at 11:02am

Many thanks for the explanation Matt, I understand Google base better now. One does wonder if such an endeavour would be worth the effort.

I also really like the unbiased performance report at the end too! :)

(Perhaps I should throw in my own disclaimer - I have a google bag and mouse mat picked up from an ad-sense fair, but that doesn't mean I'm biased either!)

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Permalink Reply by Moray Souter on July 26, 2007 at 12:34pm

Just a thought Matt, are Yahoo thinking of a service based on the concept of Google base? Surely having seen what Google have done you could potentially take the next step and improve on the service?

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Permalink Reply by Ken Levinson on August 12, 2007 at 2:52pm

It was a pain in the rear end to finally get our jobs listed, and we do get a decent number of clicks. More importantly, from a marketing prospective, I get to tell my clients and potential clients that their jobs are cross posted to Google. I can't imagine that would hurt anyone's sales. When I make any decision about my board, in consider how it could positively affect candidate responses and sales.

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Permalink Reply by Shiloh Rusk on August 29, 2007 at 9:59am

I've asked my IT team to develop the Google Base feed over 7 months ago, but have been told it's not a priority.

I found it exciting to see the Search Jobs box appear right on the Google search page. According to research presented in one of Lou Adler's webinars traditional job board traffic has decreased in favor of searches on "jobs" as a search keyword in performed in Google and Yahoo! over the past year. It's a transformation on how users default thier interactaction when searching the internet, even when looking for jobs.

I've noticed that there are a number of jobs that show up in Google Alerts under the blog reporting section. Could this be tied into posting on Google Base or it is just a function of posting the jobs into a given blog?

I'd like to start another question for discussion on the ethics of posting jobs from a job board onto a blog to gain additional exposure?

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Permalink Reply by Dennis Gorelik on August 30, 2007 at 4:09am

From my experience, Google Base brings very little traffic to by job board PostJobFree.com
That's possible that other web sites are getting links to PostJobFree.com from Google Base, but I doubt it.

Besides, from developer's perspective Google Base is poorely designed and buggy.
I consider Google Base as one of the worst Google's projects.
I would even recommend Google to fire the manager of Google Base project.

You may still consider invest your time and go through all the pain of integrating your job board with Google Base, just because of the power of Google itself.

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Permalink Reply by Julian Stopps on September 5, 2007 at 4:39pm

I've used Google base both from a job board perspective and as a publishing medium for born's news articles. In my experience it's not a huge generator of traffic, but as the only costs involved are an initial IT spend (to generate the feed) and the time it takes to regularly upload the feed, I'd say it's worth it. The base data structures are fairly well defined and a feed should not take long to generate, therefore keeping the IT costs down.

A word of warning to anyone using base from a non-US based location. Google has an odd system in place that means if you login using a domain that is not www.google.com (i.e. www.google.co.uk/base) you get a different set of base items. This can be very confusing, particularly when you go to update your batch and it looks like all of your items have disappeared.

From a job seeker perspective, base remains buggy.

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Permalink Reply by JobCircle.com on September 6, 2007 at 4:36pm

JobCircle.com been posting to Google Base almost since inception - overall, the traffic coming from Base has been very disappointing. We tout it as a distribution outlet to customers and it sounds good, but there are many other aggregators that get much better results for us. However, we feel that it is better to be there than to not be there, so as long as GB is in existence, we'll continue to distribute our jobs to them.

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