Over the past five years, the world’s biggest search engine platforms invested time and resources into the online job search and recruiting marketplace. By developing their platforms, Google and Microsoft have both cemented their place in the AI-driven job search marketplace.
Google launched its job search platform, Google for Jobs, in 2017. Not long after that, Microsoft joined the race with their platform, Bing for Jobs, which is integrated into the Bing search engine. But, what characterizes the two from one another? Is it simply the case of Microsoft looking to compete with the world’s most dominant search engine in a new market space? Or does Microsoft have a different approach that can help set them apart or even grow a bigger userbase?
A Dominant Share of Searches
There’s no shying away from the fact that Google is the world’s most dominant search engine. Google consistently accounts for over 87% of all searches in America, while Bing is closer to 6%. Regardless of this discrepancy, Microsoft holds Bing in high regard as the second most popular search engine, with the likes of Yahoo! and DuckDuckGo coming in third and fourth in terms of searches per month. Even though Google still holds a much larger market share than Microsoft, they’re both major players in the search space.
Similar Experiences, Different Fuel
Google for Jobs and Bing for Jobs both offer an extremely convenient way of conveying jobs to job seekers; with each platform, job data is displayed right within the search results window in a designated area. Job seekers never have to leave the results page to view up-to-date job postings; this is one of the greatest advantages these AI-driven platforms have over job search websites like Indeed or Monster.
While conceptually similar and operationally similar for users, Bing for Jobs differs from Google for Jobs in some key ways. The biggest difference between these two platforms, aside from the size of each userbase, is where they source their job data from.
Microsoft-owned LinkedIn is the primary source of all job postings that populate in Bing for Jobs; Microsoft utilizes the popular professional networking site to funnel jobs directly to the Bing job seekers. Google for Jobs scrapes job boards, ATSs, RMPs, sponsored job posts, and career websites for job data. This data must meet their rigorous schema requirements. Meeting this requirement is difficult, which is why many online jobs don’t make it onto Google for Jobs in the first place. Google for Jobs also promotes sponsored job posts that will populate right at the top of the search results for maximum visibility; Microsoft has not implemented a sponsored job post model in the Bing for Jobs platform as of early 2022.
While Google uses a strategy that casts the largest net possible in terms of where they source job data, Microsoft is opting to funnel Jobs to Bing primarily from a source they already control, manage and optimize. It will be interesting to see how both platforms adapt to provide users with a more desirable experience and access to a greater volume of job opportunities.
To learn more about Bing for Jobs, please see our accompanying article, “Microsoft’s ‘Bing for Jobs’ Explained.
