Google Brings Job Searching Platform To Africa

Google launched their job-hunting platform, Google For Jobs, on the 1st of March. Initially, the platform will only be available in Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa.

What is Google For Jobs?

For Jobs enables job seekers to search for jobs based on the area you are in or a specific field. The search is conducted similarly to any other normal search on Google. According to Google, phrases such as ‘jobs near me’ or ‘teaching jobs’ will bring back in-depth results enabling you to explore the job market from your browser. Job searching is available to users on both desktop and mobile and is only compatible with English for now.

More traditional methods of job hunting include going through newspapers, the web and maybe referrals if you are lucky and Google For Jobs wants to change this. Their platform aims to centralize job postings in one place and make finding a job less of a pain.

The jobs section will also contain some key information such as:

• A job description
• Required skills
• Working hours
• Ratings of the employer from trusted sites (this will not be available for all jobs)

Google says the platform is still in development and will continue to evolve as they work with organisations such as Careers24, Job Mail and so forth.

When will Zim get this?

After reading about this launch I crossed my fingers and searched ‘jobs near me.’ I thought it might be getting tested in the background but my efforts proved to be in vain.

For readers asking why everything comes to Zimbabwe late, there are two main reasons that I can think of. First of all the population of Zim(16million) compared to Kenya(48m), Nigeria(186m) and South Africa(55m) ensures that we are not a priority for companies such as Google. On top of that, we also have a struggling economy which ensures adoption of these new technologies might be tricky. Because of these two reasons products are launched elsewhere and then trickle down to us later (Remember we only got Netflix in 2016).

There is, however, a silver lining to these late launches. By the time these products launch here a lot of revisions would have been made and they might actually be in a better state than when they originally launched.

What do you think about Google For Jobs? Let’s get talking in the comments below.