json google-search schema.org google-rich-snippets rdfa

Appearing on Google Jobs with unstructured JSON data

I would like Google search engine to include the job postings from my site into their job postings search.

However the data on my site retrieved from the server is not in the appropriate job posting JSON format. Unfortunately I will not be able to fix it.

According to the official JobPosting structured data docs there is RDFa compliance available.

Example

 <div vocab="http://schema.org/" typeof="JobPosting">
  <meta property="specialCommitments" content="VeteranCommit" />
  <h2 property="title">Software Engineer</h2>
  <span>
    <p><strong>Location:</strong> <span property="jobLocation" typeof="Place"><span property="address" typeof="PostalAddress">
    <span property="addressLocality">Kirkland</span> <span property="addressRegion">WA</span></span></span></p>
  </span>
  <p><strong>Industry:</strong> <span property="industry">Computer Software</span>
  <br><strong>Occupational Category:</strong> <span property="occupationalCategory">15-1132.00 Software Developers, Application</span>
  <br><strong>Hours:</strong> <span property="employmentType">Full-time</span>, <span property="workHours">40 hours per week</span>
  <br><strong>Salary:</strong> <span property="salaryCurrency">USD</span> <span property="baseSalary">100000</span>
  </p>

If I add the appropriate RDFa property tags to my HTML but retrieve JSON from the server in the incorrect format will I still be able to get my sites job postings onto Google Jobs?

Solution

Google’s job postings guidelines say:

You must follow the general structured data quality guidelines, job posting content policies, and technical guidelines for your job posting to be eligible to appear on the Google job search experience.

The referenced structured data technical guidelines say:

The data may be embedded in your webpage using any of the supported formats: JSON-LD (recommended), RDFa, or microdata.

So Google supports all three syntaxes. This is the case for all of their rich results (unless noted otherwise). However, if you add the markup with JavaScript on the client-side, Google seems to support only JSON-LD.

Note that the fact that Schema.org shows examples in all three syntaxes doesn’t mean that a consumer (like Google) has to support all these syntaxes, too. Although Google is one of the sponsors of Schema.org, Schema.org and Google’s structured data features are separate projects.