How to get your vacancies into Google without paying a job board

Google’s job results are not an advertising product. They are gathered — pulled from ordinary company websites that describe their vacancies in a format Google can read. There is no fee, no account and no submission form.

Which means a small employer with a careers page can appear in the same place as the job boards, without paying one.

Before the how, an honest measure of who this is actually for.

Most small businesses shouldn’t bother, and here’s the evidence

I checked thirty UK small-business websites for a careers page at the two addresses you would guess — /careers and /jobs. Two had one. Neither of those two carried any job markup at all.

That is a crude test and it undercounts: plenty of firms will have a careers page at some other address, or a “we’re hiring” line on the contact page. But the direction is clear enough. If you hire once every three years, close this tab and go and do something useful — a job board for a fortnight is the right answer and there is no shame in it.

This is worth your time if you hire regularly: an agency with a rolling need, a growing firm with three or four roles a year, a recruiter whose entire business is vacancies. For that shape, the per-advert fees add up and the free channel is real.

What Google actually asks for

Five things, and they are not onerous. Google’s documentation lists these as the required properties of JobPosting structured data:

datePosted · description · hiringOrganization · jobLocation · title

That is the whole compulsory list. Everything else is optional.

The bit that catches people is not the markup at all — it is reachability. Google is blunt: the page must not be blocked by a robots.txt file, a noindex tag, or a login requirement. That last one accounts for a great many invisible careers pages, because the vacancies live inside a recruitment system behind a sign-in and the public page is just a link to it. Google cannot read what it cannot open.

Two optional bits worth getting right

Salary. baseSalary takes an hourly, daily, weekly, monthly or yearly figure, either as a single number or as a minValue and maxValue range. Publishing it is a commercial decision rather than a technical one — but candidates filter on it, and a range costs you less than the applications you never receive.

Remote. Set jobLocationType to TELECOMMUTE, and include applicantLocationRequirements to say where applicants may be based — Google requires the second whenever you use the first. And it means it about the definition: “Jobs marked as TELECOMMUTE must be fully remote. Don’t mark up jobs that allow occasional work-from-home.” Two days in the office is not remote. Marking it as such is the kind of small lie that costs you a candidate on day one.

The one that can actually get you penalised

Old vacancies.

Google’s own wording: failure to take timely action on expired jobs may result in a manual action. A manual action is a human at Google deciding your site has a problem, and it is a great deal more painful than not ranking.

Three acceptable ways to retire a posting, any of which will do:

1. Set validThrough to a date in the past. 2. Remove the page so it returns a 404 or 410. 3. Strip the JobPosting markup off it and leave the page as ordinary content.

What you must not do is the thing almost everyone does: fill the role, move on, and leave the advert sitting there marked up as open for the next two years. It wastes candidates’ time, and Google treats it as a quality problem rather than an oversight.

One vacancy, one page, one address

The structural point that decides whether any of this works: JobPosting describes a job, singular. It needs a page of its own, at its own URL, with its own dates and its own salary.

A single “current vacancies” page listing six roles in a bulleted list cannot express that, however good the intentions. If you hire often, the honest structural answer is one page per role, generated properly and retired properly — the same argument we made about listings in does every item really need its own page, and the reason recruiters end up wanting a page per vacancy rather than a PDF.

What argues the other way

Three things, and the last one is against our own interests.

A job board does something this doesn’t. It puts you in front of people actively browsing who have never heard of you. Appearing in Google’s jobs results serves the person searching for your kind of role; it does not build an audience. For a hard-to-fill position, paying is often simply correct.

It is work that keeps needing doing. Markup on every role, dates kept current, expired ones retired on time. Set it up and neglect it and you have built yourself a liability rather than a channel.

And it is plumbing on somebody else’s platform, which can be withdrawn. Google retired FAQ rich results this May — a deprecation notice quietly added to a developer page on 7 May 2026, no announcement, with the reporting and testing tools switched off over the following months. Every article on this blog still carries FAQ markup that now earns nothing in Google. We left it because it still helps other things read the page, but we are not pretending it does what it used to. Assume the same could happen here, and don’t make it your only route to a candidate.

The short version

Five required properties, a page Google can actually open, one page per vacancy, and a discipline for taking old ones down. If you hire regularly it is a free channel worth having. If you hire rarely, pay the job board and spend the afternoon on something that matters more.

Sources: the required and recommended properties, the crawlability rules, the TELECOMMUTE wording and the manual-action warning are all from Google’s own JobPosting structured data documentation, read directly on 21 August 2026, which carried no deprecation notice at that date. The FAQ rich result deprecation dates from a notice added to Google’s FAQ structured data documentation on 7 May 2026. The thirty-site sample is my own, run the day before publication against UK small-business websites, checking only /careers and /jobs — a deliberately crude method that will undercount careers pages held at other addresses, and far too small to be a survey. It is offered as a rough sense of scale, not a statistic.