One of the trickiest parts of job applications – and a key contributor to the gender pay gap – is the clandestine nature of salary expectations. What is this job worth? What worth should I put on myself? A new addition to Google’s job-search toolkit could help answer some of those questions, with an update bringing salary estimates to job ads.
If a salary is included in a listing, Google for Jobs will automatically surface that information in the job search results. Unfortunately, most jobs don’t make this figure clear. For that bulk of opportunities, Google will create an estimate itself, based on data pulled from Glassdoor, PayScale, and LinkedIn.
These estimates also take into account a job’s location when coming up with a salary estimate. Users will also be able to narrow down their search locations between 2 and 200 miles away, or select “anywhere” – something that plenty of job sites already offer.
Google for Jobs rolled out earlier this year, but has yet to make its way outside of the US. The search giant has said that more countries should be coming in the future, although it hasn’t given anything in the way of a timeframe. The career search tool leverages Google’s machine learning and AI capabilities to draw listings from a sprawl of leading job sites, including Monster, CareerBuilder, Facebook and LinkedIn.
Of course, AI and human jobs haven’t had the best relationship over the past few years. There is sustained concern about the looming threat of automation, with some reports pointing to one in five jobs being affected. This weekend, chancellor Philip Hammond attempted to talk down the threat, pointing to the lack of unemployed shorthand typists:
“I remember 20 years ago we were worrying about what was going to happen to the million shorthand typists in Britain as the personal computer took over,” he said on the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show.” Well nobody has a shorthand typist these days, but where are all these unemployed people?
He even added: “There are no unemployed people.”
Tell that to Google for Jobs.
Disclaimer: Some pages on this site may include an affiliate link. This does not effect our editorial in any way.
