YM Careers customers see traffic lift from Google for Jobs.

As the juggernaut in consumer search, Google’s new focus on helping connect job seekers and employers carries with it the weight of tremendous scale. Working with Google, YourMembership (YM) has quickly ensured jobs posted to the career centers of our nearly 3,000 YM Careers customers are indexed and now discoverable in Google for Jobs.

This means that in addition to the association members, publication readers, email and newsletter recipients who already traffic the job boards YM powers, employers who pay our customers to expose jobs to highly-qualified candidates will now also have access to the millions of potential job seekers who search using Google for Jobs. Not only does this provide more applicants to employers, but it will also drive more traffic to association or publisher websites, creating potential members and readers.

Specifically, Google traffic on sites YM powers has collectively grown approximately 12% during the past several weeks, and continues to trend upward.

Here’s how it works.

Embedded at the top of traditional Google search results is a new interface which pulls relevant jobs from multiple sources and exposes them to the Google user in a structured way. Job seekers can see basic information about each job with the ability to access more detailed information. When job seekers click to apply, they are taken to the original source of the job posting, which may now lead directly to a YM Careers customer’s job board.

Job quality and relevance is king.

Google is built on a promise of delivering relevant content to its users, and Google for Jobs is no exception. The jobs ultimately displayed to the user are based on quality and relevance. This can benefit our customers who often display niche, hard-to-fill positions with detailed job descriptions.

Niche job boards must compete against the likes of mass job boards and job aggregators, such as Glassdoor, Indeed or LinkedIn. While the traditional Google interface typically favors larger sites (due to their massive amount of job content, housing millions of jobs), Google for Jobs provides an opportunity for the best (and most relevant) job content to show at the top. This levels the playing field for sites of all sizes, including niche job boards.

While Google for Jobs provides a windfall of traffic today, there are plenty of reasons to be cautious about its ongoing impact for the future as the service evolves. YM will continue to innovate to ensure our customers realize the benefits available today. But, we will also continue to work with our customers to implement the important best practices to keep their recruitment advertising businesses strong, regardless of the impact of third parties like Google or others.