Way back in 2002 / 2003, while I was working at Monster India, I had the privilege of meeting Jeff Taylor, founder of Monster in Hyderabad. At that time, job sites were just about evolving in India and along with Monster, Naukri and Job Ahead were already playing a key role in that evolution. At a formal meet and greet during his visit, he asked us whom did we see as a threat to Monster and all of mentioned either Naukri or Jobs Ahead. Visionary that he is, Jeff Taylor instead asked us why we don’t see Google as competition and how would we cope if Google were to enter the fray. Now, after decade and half, Google is finally taking a plunge into job search.

Most of us might feel Google is entering into job search late. Indeed.com has filled the gap of aggregating and is working wonders, especially in the US. At the outset, it looks like a very crowded and over serviced market. However, gaps still exist at a very basic level and no one is able to address them effectively.

I would like Google to address the most important and basic gap in job search that is of relevancy and accuracy of search results. Every company has a different way of writing job descriptions, roles, designations etc. and it becomes frustrating for job seekers to swift through irrelevant jobs. Despite all the job sites, aggregators and LinkedIn having wealth of information about the users, they end up showing several irrelevant jobs to the users. Earlier known behaviors, skills, resumes all come to a naught because everyone is focusing on search and not finding jobs. This is where I hope Google will provide answers. Though the initial stories tell us it will be restricted when someone is searching for jobs, I hope they do more in this space. They arguably have most data of the users and their behaviors. Google knows everything about every user is an understatement. If they are really able to bring in Big Data, AI and Machine Learning into finding jobs, there could be a day when a user logs into google and based on the previous activities (mails user opened, sites visited, people / companies followed on social media, chat sessions) it could not only predict accurately that a user will contemplate change of job, but also can throw right jobs, giving finding jobs an entirely new meaning.

I believe Google will not add any value if it just follows a user’s job search string and does not utilize wealth of data it captures of every user.