Since 2016 I seem to find myself finding some excuse to make an annual call for a renewed uptake of the schema.org JobPosting standard…so this year ‘World Standards Day’ gets the honor of giving me a hook to hang this post on.

For five years JobPosting has been one of the UK Government’s mandated open standards and the DWP ‘Find a Job’ service supports it nicely (and is actually a really nicely done jobs ‘board’ that doesn’t get the attention it deserves I think.)

Unfortunately more generally awareness remains low from what I can tell and the main Civil Service vacancies website itself does not support the standard. A brief bit of research suggests none of the popular services like JazzHR, Workable et al support it by default and definitely no local government, charity or higher education jobs boards I encounter when I am researching my weekly jobs newsletter include it.

At the most base level this just feels like a missed opportunity for so many potential employers – everybody understands that job seekers are likely to start with Google for this as with everything so missing out on a straightforward opportunity to improve the SEO of vacancies seems self defeating.

It is safe to say that the amount of job seekers is only going to rise in the immediate future – unemployment is rising, redundancies are spiking – so any opportunity to improve this experience seems to be timely and important.

Back in 2016 Richard Pope was making recommendations for how to improve uptake of the standard and all of his suggestions pretty much hold true today. Hopefully somebody, somewhere is in a position to take up the mantle and to push things forward…finally.