• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, December 21, 2011

Looking for a job? Google, Bing and Yahoo want to make it as easy as pulling up a search engine in a browser and typing a few choice keywords into the search box.

DirectEmployers said Tuesday that USA.jobs became the first online job search tool to support the new standard from Schema.org, making it possible for search engines to categorize and list jobs online. The Schema.org Job Listing standard enables search engines to categorize jobs by location, job title, education, and veteran's preference. The JobPosting markup was announced in early November by schema.org and the U.S. Department of Labor.

"The standard, co-created by Bing, Google and Yahoo, is designed to allow for an extension of the schema by other parties," said Stefan Weitz, senior director of Bing. "And because we've all agreed to use it as part of our crawling, indexing, and display in our own ways, job listings using this standard could also be enhanced on Bing."

Using the markup, the U.S. Veterans administration created a search widget accessible across several federal Web sites, including nrd.gov and whitehouse.gov, supporting the hunt for jobs.

The location of the post is specified with the Job Location property in the JobPosting schema. Search engines will display data from the JobPosting schema as Rich Snippets. The Rich Snippets Testing Tool allows searchers to preview the JobPosting data on a Web page. The URL to review the JobPosting schema data from USA.jobs site allows developers to enter a Web page URL to see how it may appear in search results.

Universities and related learning centers will likely bid on job-related keywords to serve up with query results. No announcements yet -- but we'll see if the engines add a tab to the search results specific to finding a job.