Over the course of the last year or so, Google started adding more job search features to its search engine. Today, it’s expanding this program by also making it easier to find work-from-home jobs.
Typically, when you search for a job like that, chances are you’ll be bombarded with a bunch of low-quality or even potentially malicious sites. Now, when you search for a job in Google Search using a query like “customer support jobs,” you’ll be able to set the location to “work from home” to find remote and telecommute jobs. Google says that a number of job listing sites, including Working Nomads, We Work Remotely and ZipRecruiter already support this feature. To filter these jobs, Google looks at the standard Schema.org markup that most job sites use to push their listings to Google Jobs.
“Through a number of user studies, we learned that most remote jobs were not clearly labeled as such,” Google product manager Jennifer Su writes in today’s 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.”
Google already lets job searchers filter by commute times and type of transit, so it makes sense to add this work-from-home option, too, especially now that more employees are looking for this kind of flexibility.