Google has launched Hire, an online application for job listings and application tracking which is targeted at small and medium businesses. Hire has been in beta mode since April this year and was being tested by companies like Medisas, Poynt, DramaFever, SingleHop, and CoreOS. The hiring product which was available on an invite-basis since inception is now open to all users.

Hire integrates with G Suite—Google’s suite of productivity apps including Gmail, docs, calendar, among others. The software makes it easier for businesses to find new talent, schedule interviews, build a database of resumes, and sync data across other G Suite apps. Note that Google also has an aggregated online job board named “Google for Jobs” which was unveiled for US users in June. It aggregates job listings from other platforms with reviews of employers. With Google for Jobs, the company was targeting job seekers, while Hire is a collaborative platform for both employers (job providers) and job seekers.

Features:

  • Integration with Gmail and Google Calendar: Businesses can easily communicate with potential candidates via Gmail or Hire and get those email synced parallelly in both services.  The Google calendar integration allows businesses to schedule or keep track of upcoming interviews in Calendar view. Each candidate entry in Google Calendar will include contact info, the full interview schedule and what questions each interviewer should focus on
  • Move data from Hire to other platforms: Companies can use Hire to build a searchable database of old and new employees as well as potential employees in an excel sheet. Users can move this data to other services and visualize it using Google Sheets. Jobs can also be posted on online job boards like Indeed or Glassdoor straight from Google Hire data, and each hiring source’s marketing spends can be populated on demand.
  • HR team collaboration: Hiring is not a time spending activity, and might involve more than one HRs and decision makers. Hire make it easy for recruiters to share feedback with candidates and with fellow team members using @mention tags privately. Hire can also be used to discreetly share interview feedback with rest of the management.

Users require a Google account to log-in

To start using Google Hire, a user will require their Google accounts and this poses a privacy risk since Google records a lot of sensitive information like location, work history, contact info, among others. It is not clear what privacy controls are available to Hire users, but in a statement to Gizmodo in April Google clarified: “Google does not share private information such as search or viewing history. Only the information that applicants input into Google Hire will be shared—for example, first name, last name, email address, resume, cover letter, etc.” The clarification came after speculations on the Internet that Hire can be used by employers to look through potential employees’ search history and web browsing habits.

Competition

Google Hire will compete with Microsoft’s Linkedin which now claims to have over 500 million users, with more than 10 million active job listings and access to nine million companies. Facebook also made its entry into the enterprise communication space with the launch of Workplace in October last year. It has all generic Facebook features like News Feed, Groups, Chat, Live Video, Auto-translate, Work Chat, Trending posts, Search filters among others.