In this latest episode Chad and Joel are joined by SEO wizard and part-time carpenter, Alexander Chukovski. This time, Alexander brings his magic toolbox to dive into Google's latest core update—a "tiny" tweak that has caused job search chaos, leaving major players like Indeed sweating more than a long-tail keyword stuff gone wrong.
Alex—still apparently hiding out in rural Germany, or so we think—talks about how Google is shaking up the game by favoring ATS results over, well, *everything else*. Indeed? More like *Indeed Who?*. Our trio dissects how the Google overlords seem to be prioritizing branded searches and niche job sites, putting the final nail in the coffin for spammy job boards. Cue dramatic music.
As if that's not enough, the crew speculates on whether Google is *intentionally* sticking it to Indeed, thanks to their high-profile fling with OpenAI. If you're curious about what happens when tech titans throw shade, this episode's got your fix.
And as always, Chad and Joel keep it real, cracking jokes and sharing their no-holds-barred insights. Tune in for your daily dose of HR-tech snark, SEO drama, and predictions about the future of job search (spoiler: your AI overlord is coming for your job hunt).
Quotes You’ll Love:
- “Google's probably sitting in a room somewhere saying, ‘Indeed who? Never heard of them.’”
- “If I knew Google’s next move, I’d be playing the lottery instead of talking to you guys.”
- "For a company that calls itself 'Indeed,' they're starting to look more like 'Indead' after this update."
PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION
Joel (00:22.986)
OHHHH
Joel (00:27.83)
V Gates, it's your favorite podcast, the Chad and Cheese podcast. I'm your cohost, Joel Cheeseman. Joined as always, Chad Sowash is in the house as we welcome Alexander Chukovski, founder of Crypto Careers and Google Expert. Alexander, welcome back to HR's Most Dangerous Podcast.
Chad (00:35.686)
Hello!
Chad (00:40.157)
There he is.
Alexander (00:48.096)
Thank you for having me for the second time
Chad (00:49.688)
Looks like you're in hiding. Looks like you're in hiding. What's going on there?
Joel (00:51.19)
He isn't hiding. Jeez.
Alexander (00:53.516)
Just my second job, know, if SEO doesn't work out, I'll just build houses. It's pretty good investment.
Joel (00:58.7)
He's a carpenter. He's a carpenter. Yes. He's, he's making shoes in a rural Germany, Alexander. Some of our listeners, aren't familiar with you. I encouraged them to check out the episode we did, quite a while back, give us, give us the elevator pitch on you and what you do.
Chad (01:05.309)
making shoes.
Alexander (01:15.478)
Yeah, so I help job boards, ADSes, HR tech companies in our space optimize their SEO presence, also optimize Google jobs. And I also run a few niche job boards, which has been my specialty and motivation to stay in industry. And on the other side, I advise other job boards in all kinds of AI related automation projects. So job parsing, job
Chad (01:32.819)
Mm -hmm.
Alexander (01:44.162)
classification, search matching, wherever you can think of, or you could use AI, like real AI, not the fake one.
Joel (01:54.188)
That's another podcast. Don't, don't go down that road yet.
Chad (01:54.323)
Not the fake one. Not the fake one. Yes. This time we're going to be, we, we brought you on to talk about Google's core update. they, they just released a, seems like a, an algorithm update and it looks like the changes are even deeper than that. impact mainly on the job search side of the house. We're talking about the normal, you know, search engine results pages, as well as the Google for jobs search pages. So.
Alexander (01:55.924)
That's our podcast.
Chad (02:21.543)
Give us kind of like a quick overview of what you've seen thus far. And if you think this is a big change, big impact, no impact, what are your thoughts?
Alexander (02:29.846)
Well, so I have to monitor Google and what happens. And last week, a pretty large core update finished. So they used to usually do core updates maybe twice a year. Now with the AI content, they actually do a bit more, as you have probably noticed. And what I saw in the US is that the results that job seekers get when they do job searches have changed substantially.
Chad (02:48.285)
Mm
Alexander (02:59.054)
And I guess one of the major changes is that Google is actually, on the one hand, pushing jobs from ATSs, which is a completely new direction that they're going into. And on the other hand, what I see is that they're actually, whenever they're good search results that match the job query of the user, and Google seems to be pretty sure that there is actually an exact match.
Chad (03:12.427)
Mm.
Alexander (03:28.908)
to this search, they actually serve actual job ad pages as the top organic result, right? They don't serve the indeed search result page with jobs. They actually serve jobs from the ATS. And that's pretty, pretty fascinating. Pretty fascinating for me.
Joel (03:49.288)
I'm about digging into the update. Does it have a name? How long has it been rolling out? Is it for classifieds only? Talk a little bit about the big picture Google update so when people hear the name, they know what we're talking about.
Alexander (04:03.584)
Yeah, so in theory, right, there was one large spam update that Google rolled out, I think, three or four months ago. And it made a lot of niche sites owners pretty angry because it just decimated their organic traffic. And unfortunately, they killed also some pretty good sites where you were kind of sure that there was no AI content in place. There was no crappy content. You know, it was handwritten by actual humans.
And this core update, on the one hand, is supposed to these issues. But on the other hand, it's supposed to help people discover more relevant content for their search and not content that has been made to specifically rank on Google. And this is where it gets very interesting with the change, because when job seekers search, they're actually used to seeing a
search result landing page from Indeed, right, or from LinkedIn, or from StepStone, right? So you search for marketing manager jobs in Austin, you'll see Indeed first. But if you search for product marketing job, OpenAI, you don't see the old Indeed OpenAI product marketing search result page with jobs from OpenAI. You actually see links to jobs, to actual jobs that are
Chad (05:07.535)
Mm
Alexander (05:31.638)
hosted on the ATS of OpenAI.
Joel (05:34.262)
And when you say open AI, mean just the company name. So open AI could be target. could be Microsoft. It's just the company name or the brand that's that's specific, but this is not an update. That's just targeting Google for jobs. I'm hearing this is a, this is a wider, wider update to help all results across the board. Am I correct there?
Alexander (05:40.608)
Walmart
Alexander (05:53.898)
Yeah, so it pretty much targets the way Google builds the search result page, the SERP pages. So the SERP page normally has some elements that you see. So there are jobs, sorry, sponsored results at the top. After that, you have one or two organic searches. Usually, if you do a job -related search, you'll see first the Google jobs feature. And then you'll see the organic search. And then at the bottom,
or somewhere in the middle, might see people ask for, you know, this annoying part. And my feeling is that they're revamping this completely. And I don't think that it was specifically done for recruitment marketing or for job boards or ATSS as a whole. I think it's a result of the way the algorithm takes into consideration what is a high quality domain and what is like a authoritative domain, right?
Chad (06:26.792)
Mm.
Joel (06:54.306)
Do you have a sense, know, Google, Google throw stuff at the wall quite frequently. you know, see if something works. He sings it's seen in the wild. They get seen in different countries, but not other countries. Like what, what is your sense right now watching this, that this is going to be a, a change that sticks or is it something like, know, I've seen this, let's keep an eye on it and we'll make a, make a, you know, some sort of a guess as whether or not it sticks or not. Like what's, what's your take on the stickiness of this update?
Alexander (07:20.29)
If I knew that, I should probably play the lottery, right? But I mean, with Google, of course, you can expect everything. But this seems to me like a very substantial algorithm change, right? So we're not talking about putting a Google job ads feature on top of the search results and then just killing it. Or like in Europe, we have this job sites feature that we see below Google jobs that you don't have in the US.
This one, yeah, you can turn on and turn off all the time, but this feels like, like actual global change to the ranking algorithm. So my guess is that, yeah, I think so. Yeah.
Joel (08:01.516)
Definitely sticking around in your view. Kyrgios, just real quick, you mentioned some of the winners or companies or search results. think definitely winners are in this bucket and talk about who wins in this and who are the losers. Like give me sort of your scorecard.
Alexander (08:18.496)
Yeah, mean, probably we all laugh a little bit, but it seems to me like a very large job board that everyone knows worldwide is going to lose a little bit. I'm talking about Indeed. Yeah, true, true, true that. So the...
Joel (08:31.212)
We name names on this show, Alexander.
Joel (08:36.972)
I think he's, said, indeed everybody indeed is going to suck it.
Alexander (08:41.054)
Yeah, I mean, they still win pretty much for like generic searches, right? So marketing jobs, Austin, you still see indeed at the top. But once you go into more precise searches, like into long tail or especially into branded searches, it's really the career pages that get pushed and the actual job ads on the ATS. So to me, it sounds like indeed we'll see some pain.
Chad (08:58.119)
Mm.
Chad (09:10.055)
Yeah. Well, in seeing a lot of this rollout, once you, once you made me aware, I started to dig in and I noticed that indeed, the actual results pages for Google for jobs, there were not many results for indeed. And I was doing searches all over the place in the U S and usually, you know, indeed would dominate those search engine results pages for Google for jobs. They're not, in a few.
not really specific, I guess you could say specific enough, like sales jobs in Indianapolis, there were three Indeed jobs and over a hundred listings, three. And usually they dominate the page, right? And then you take a look at something else that I think was incredibly big is that you have a lot of these niche job sites showing up very high in the search results page as well. So what I'm seeing, at least
Alexander (10:01.932)
Yeah, yeah.
Chad (10:08.367)
on the Google for jobs results page side of the house is that Google understands that first and foremost, the highest trusted source that's out there is the corporate career page, right? The jobs coming directly from the applicant tracking system because that's where they start. That's where everything starts, right? And then you've got even more trust for niche job sites because they do specialize.
which I thought was incredibly interesting. I don't know if this is their logic or what it is, but this is what I'm seeing from all the search and research that I've been doing. What are your thoughts around those two pieces for the Google for Job site?
Alexander (10:48.298)
Yeah, so I think, so what was in this strategy, right? Over the years. So they created millions. Yeah, exactly.
Chad (10:55.988)
They flooded the zone with everything.
Alexander (11:00.638)
Yeah, and if you look at Indeed's search result landing pages for OpenAI, you see that they have one for OpenAI, then they have one for OpenAI jobs, and they have one for OpenAI, OpenAI jobs, and so on and so on. So literally something that in today's context of Google's vision of what high quality is, this strategy seems like spam, like pure spam, because it's just job listings and...
Chad (11:13.011)
Yes.
Alexander (11:26.774)
niche job boards on the other hand, at least the ones that I saw that performed very well, they invested a lot of time in adding additional content on the search pages, right? So they provided like average salaries. They provided very helpful links to other job categories that might be relevant to you. They actually picked employers that really hire right now for these specific searches. And I think that Google is seeing this and they're just, you
Chad (11:47.794)
Mm.
Alexander (11:56.615)
saying, okay, you did a good job. Indeed, search result page just jobs. There's absolutely nothing from the perspective of high quality content. So I'm just going to push these results up. That's what I think is happening.
Chad (12:12.305)
Yeah, we, when Google for jobs first came out, we thought this would be where they moved years ago. but it's taken them a very long time just because from the standpoint, again, you know, we take a look at the ultimate trusted source for a job. that's the company, right? The company actually created the job and then, you know, then there's the distribution mechanisms that happen, which are the, different websites. So indeed to the world, you know, and then some of the niche sites of the world. So.
That to me, I thought was interesting. Do you think this is a move because of all the litigation that's out there to be able to actually bring some of those other niche sites? I mean, I'm seeing the ad zunas that are out there more. I didn't see them a lot before. Seeing LinkedIn, not a small site. Seeing Zippercruter, not a small site, but I'm not seeing a lot of indeed. So it almost feels like there's a shift in the SEO power from Google.
Why do you think that would be?
Alexander (13:12.108)
Well, interesting. know, I mean, Google lost this huge monopoly case in the U S so that's kind of a motivation to seek some change for sure, because we'll be like the next monopoly case, right? We had already one in Europe from a job board, that the job or actually lost. So if there is some kind of synchronization between the U S and the European side of Google, it's probably very controversial statement to base any decision on.
these cases. So I'm just going to stick with the helpful content update, bringing content to searchers that's actually relevant for them. And I think they're just trying to, if I search for a job for a specific company where Google already knows that this is the actual job in this city from this company and it's on the ATS, why send me to a search results page with 50 other jobs? Send me to this exact job.
that I'm looking for. It's pretty logical. It's so logical when you say it out loud.
Joel (14:17.75)
Yeah, we've been talking about this for a long time. you're the, really the focus I'm hearing is on branded searches. So I want a job at a particular company and then, and then positions in that company. Is it your sense that this will go upstream to more general searches, or do you think that it will stay in? I don't want to say long tail because maybe that's sort of in the middle. but does this flow upstream in your opinion?
Alexander (14:43.286)
I just don't see what's the logical layer for it to go upstream. So if you're looking for a more generic search, why you cannot show jobs from ATSs, right? In order to trigger the ATS thing, you need the company. So the more generic you will, you stay, then the indies are still going to win just because of the sheer SEO power that they have. But for long tail, and everyone in the job board industry knows that the long tail is where the opportunity is.
Right? All of them, I think have a huge opportunity right now to grab away from. It's the only opportunity. Yeah. Yeah.
Joel (15:18.56)
For a lot, it's the only opportunity, right? A lot of them don't have hope of ranking for sales jobs. They have to go long tail for that stuff. We talked a while back about Google getting into the pay -per -click game and monetizing this part of their business. They stepped away from that recently. Any guesses on, do they get back in? Are we going to start talking about them trying to monetize this stuff if they are indeed improving the search results?
Alexander (15:47.746)
So my bet is that, and this is a very wild bet, right? So like 1 % chance of this happening. So don't take my word for advice or investment advice. But in Europe, right, we have this job sites feature, literally, it's literally like a carousel of job search result pages that you can swipe through. And my bet is that they will allow job sites to sponsor these results.
So it's going to be an additional form of sponsored results. And then Google Jobs is going to come back in some specific form, but only for employers, not for job boards. Because once you give it to job boards, it's a cluster F -U -C -K, right? You have to think about the whole, where did this job come from? Who scraped who? Where are you going to send the job seeker to? That's a nightmare for Google. They don't want to have this. But from an ATS, why not?
Chad (16:39.667)
Mm
Alexander (16:47.499)
sense?
Chad (16:49.693)
Why I think it's interesting that you said that you're not sure that they're going to start showing company jobs and some of those broad searches. Well, they are Alexander. I'm actually looking at sales jobs in Indianapolis and they're peppered with jobs from applicant tracking systems. They're not there now they're heavy heavier on the LinkedIn zipper critter. They're not a lot of indeed listings, but just from that, just from that look and that sample that's
That says something and if they start moving in that direction in offering sales positions, marketing positions, those types of things, I think, I mean, that could be a huge game changer, don't you think?
Alexander (17:32.61)
to turn the industry upside down, right? Because if you take SEO from Indeed, what's left?
Chad (17:38.77)
Mm -hmm.
I mean, they're doing it now. I mean, if you take a look at the search engine results, at least for the Google for jobs, it used to be dominated by, you know, I should almost say dominated by Indeed, but there was much more infusion of Indeed jobs there, not so much anymore. Now, the thing that I think is even bigger is that Google now often skips showing the Google for jobs results pages.
Alexander (18:08.65)
Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
Chad (18:10.617)
and they go directly just to their regular search engine result, right? So they don't even go to, if you have jobs in it, and I'll give you a great example. I put in DuPont scientist jobs, and usually that flips to Google for jobs and it'll show relevant search results for jobs, but it didn't. It kept me in the regular search engine result page for Google, right? And that's not what it usually does.
Alexander (18:21.996)
Mm
Chad (18:38.683)
So it's starting to find more relevant content and keep you in the normal Google search engine result page and not flip you over to Google for jobs, which again is another big smack to, you know, the indeed's, the LinkedIn's, the, the zipper critters of the world.
Alexander (18:58.486)
Yeah, and to guys that sell Google Jobs optimization, thanks, Chad. No, mean, seriously, I agree. So I do see that there are a lot of cases where Google Jobs is not triggered. If you do searches for career, that's actually even worse in that sense, that it's really hard to trigger the Google Jobs feature.
Chad (19:03.609)
Hahaha!
Joel (19:06.337)
Set them up.
Alexander (19:29.686)
Now the question is, if you're having a generic search, is this the best result for the user? So if you're able to serve a very relevant job to this search, then I understand. But with generic searches, this is where I would say, sure if this would be the best way to go. There I would prefer to see the Google jobs result, just as a job seeker, not as a consultant or whatever.
Chad (20:01.267)
Gotcha. good.
Joel (20:01.44)
Alexander I want you to put your tinfoil hat on for a second. Well I want it fully on. Is Google trying to stick it to Indeed?
Chad (20:06.021)
It's already on. It's already on.
Alexander (20:16.512)
I think so. Yeah. I mean, just think about it. okay. So just, just think about how absurd it is that there will be some people at Google that sit in a meeting and say, Hey, did you read that, you know, indeed is going to spend hundreds of millions with open AI and not with us, where we send them so much free traffic. maybe we should cut out the traffic. Let's, you know, the prioritizing deed in our search results.
Joel (20:19.478)
Say more, say more.
Alexander (20:44.502)
Yeah, sure. Why not? Let's call some engineers and do it. That would be crazy. Right.
Joel (20:50.05)
For those that don't know, talk about this relationship with OpenAI. I think a lot of people won't know what you're talking about. What is Indeed doing with OpenAI?
Alexander (20:55.71)
Yeah. this is, this is exciting. So, how much time do we have? Okay. I'll try to keep it in like one minute. So,
Joel (21:02.913)
I've time.
Take your time.
Alexander (21:07.586)
OpenAI first published, I think around March, a very quiet press release that indeed has started using the fine -tuned GPT 3 .5 for AI -based search, which is complete bullshit, you know, from a technical perspective. But a little bit later, Indeed published their like five -year annual strategy. I think you discussed the sales and marketing part of it. I actually looked into the product slides.
And there they have the strategy, which is, hey, let's get a lot of structured data out of jobs. Use that together with the activity of the profiles of the users to build way more detailed profiles and then go into staffing or whatever the sales strategy out there is. So how do you get the structured data out of jobs? Well, in traditional machine learning, it's awful. build.
So you need to do, you need your training data. You need to train a model. You need to deploy it. In a generative AI driven world, you can just do zero short calls, right? So you ask a model to extract some data from a job description and then you can verify it against the original job. And this is what they did with GPT 3 .5. And this is why they have a cooperation with OpenAI. This is...
as much as I can make out of the documents. Now, for some reason, both Indeed and OpenAI started pushing this press release like a month ago. So, you know, very quiet release in March, nothing for three and a half, four months, suddenly huge explosion of information. If you Google it, there are tons of results. And that's a very expensive service.
Joel (23:02.76)
Let's pull on that generative AI, that string for a second. At some point, you can envision a future where we all have copilots, right? Whether it's powered by Google or Apple or whatever. And this copilot answers every question we have. At some point, they're going to help us find a job, aren't they? Like what future does Google have with these sort of search results versus I have a copilot.
Alexander (23:02.796)
They paid a lot of money.
Joel (23:32.034)
They know my LinkedIn, they know all about me. They know all the jobs that are out there. Maybe that's what Indeed is doing. Indeed is getting in front of the puck on this one. But what does job search look like in the future from your viewpoint? And is the typical traditional Google search still going to be around in 10 years?
Alexander (23:49.986)
really hard to, say anything about 10 year periods. I wouldn't do it, but maybe in the next five years I see the agents. Yeah. So, next five years definitely. We'll have agents that do your job search and job application for you. only problem for Google to go a bit more in this direction is the ATS integration there.
Joel (23:58.742)
Whatever period you want.
Alexander (24:19.052)
which the three of us know that it's awful and it cannot be skipped, right? So if there is a way to push profile data to companies via new standard, like schema, you see where I'm getting there? Job posting schema, application schema, and then you're a big player that can actually force this type of.
Chad (24:23.282)
Mm -hmm.
Joel (24:41.964)
Mm -hmm.
Alexander (24:49.255)
standard to other smaller players, then I do see the whole agent future where you just have one large, I don't know, career center that does everything for you. But it's a lot of ifs.
Joel (25:02.178)
Yeah. The, the, the jobs will find you in the future as, a popular narrative, for a lot of, a lot of people. I'm going to let you out on this. You run up a site, you run a site called crypto careers. I just, just generally speaking, what is the state of crypto careers right now?
Alexander (25:23.522)
Well, you know what, it's actually a very interesting place because we all talk about the way I apply madness that job seekers do and know, fake applications, stuff like that. We encrypt all. Yeah, we encrypt. We know this. We've been there for ages. Like, I mean, we have North Korean applicants that have been trying to get into companies for years. So the industry is very advanced on detecting scammy and spammy applications.
Joel (25:34.614)
Lazy apply.
Alexander (25:52.066)
I wouldn't say that the demand is not as high as it was three years ago. We are very far away from this level, but there are companies are still raising money. I think it's only 30 % below like the all time high. When you look at venture capital, companies are still hiring people. It's not as glamorous as generative AI for sure. Occasionally I think that all the folks that remain in crypto are probably very sad that they weren't able to switch to generative AI in time.
But I think it's a solid industry for now. Whether or not there is a huge use case for consumers beyond speculating and sending money around, that's another topic.
Chad (26:37.907)
Well, that is Alex Chakowsky. That's right, Alex. So if somebody wants a little bit more SEO juice, a little Alex juice on the SEO, where can they find you and where can they talk SEO madness with you?
Alexander (26:56.034)
Go to LinkedIn, Alexander Chukovsky and there I post every day. Or if you want my longer analysis, go to my blog, alexandrchukovsky .com.
Chad (27:09.747)
Beautiful.
Joel (27:10.626)
that crazy Google. It's fun watching. Chad, that is another one in the can. We out.
Chad (27:17.169)
Way out.
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