14 DAY TRIAL // Google is boasting about a new project it helped put together which will act as a jobs directory for US war veterans. The idea is to connect companies committed to hiring veterans with said veterans looking for a job.
"Earlier today, President Obama spoke about the importance of helping returning military veterans find work," Christina Chen, Product Manager, Custom Search Team, wrote.
"Thousands of businesses have committed to hiring military veterans and families and as part of this nationwide effort, starting today, job seekers can visit the National Resource Directory (NRD) to search more than 500,000 job openings from employers around the country," she said.
The new site, as you can imagine since this is Google talking about it, is build around Google technologies. Specifically, Google has used its custom search engine technology to create what is essentially a jobs search engine.
"We have been working with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs to provide a customized job search engine for the NRD, using Google Custom Search technology," Chen explained.
What's interesting about is that the search engine actually scourers the web for job postings on various sites. It's using the 'JobPosting' markup, which is part of the standard Schema.org, to distinguish the posts from everything else online.
Of course, it doesn't look for just any job postings, it singles out the ones that offer to hire veterans, which is what makes it useful in the first place.
In order to be able to create a wide as possible search index, Google is urging jobs site to add the markup to their entries. This makes it easier to discover these particular postings, but it also makes it easier for search engines to retrieve job ad data and present it to searches when relevant.