To some people, working from inside the comfort zone is a dream job. As a matter of fact, millions of people around the world prefer to earn money from working at home.
And this is where Google wants that covered. After adding more job search features to its search engine, including the ability to filter by commute times and type of transit, as well as enhancing its job search capabilities in more than 100 language, it makes sense that Google wants to add work-from-home option, too.
Knowing that there are more people looking for jobs with this kind of flexibility, "we are announcing an improved job search experience that allows our customers to make remote work opportunities in the U.S. more discoverable on their career sites."
Typically, when users searched for a job like that on Google, chances are, they will be bombarded with a long list of low-quality or even potentially malicious sites.
With the update, a Google Search query like "customer support jobs", for example, users can set the location filter to ‘work from home’ to find remote and telecommute jobs.
According to Google product manager Jennifer Su in the announcement:
"And our customers have told us it is difficult to accurately detect and return remote opportunities when users enter ‘work from home’ or related queries into their search box. By offering this capability to our customers, we hope to make remote work opportunities more discoverable to job seekers who need them."
Job seekers have different lifestyle and geographic needs that require flexibility.
Some people, for example, prefer to work from home because it enables them as parents or caregivers, to be more available to their families. What's more, in the generation where milennials and Generation Zs are growing up and getting older, there are an increasing number of people who use the internet as a method of communication, and work.
According to Su, these people are much likelier to stay in a role for 5+ years, if their company is flexible about where and when they work.
This improved functionality that supports the discoverability of remote work opportunities is available to any site using Cloud Talent Solution to power its job search. And to filter these jobs, Google looks at the standard Schema.org markup that most job websites use to push their listings to Google Jobs.
Google said that a number of job listing sites, including Working Nomads, We Work Remotely and ZipRecruiter are already supporting this feature.
"By offering this capability to our customers, we hope to make remote work opportunities more discoverable to job seekers who need them," said Su.