Once you find a job, Google will direct you to the job site to start the actual application process. For jobs that appeared on multiple sites, Google will link you to the one with the most complete job posting. “We hope this will act as an incentive for sites to share all the pertinent details in their listings for job seekers,” a Google spokesperson told me. As for the actual application process itself, Google doesn’t want to get in the way here and it’s not handling any of the process after you have found a job on its service.

It’s worth noting that Google doesn’t try to filter jobs based on what it already knows. As [product manager Nick] Zakrasek quipped, the fact that you like to go fishing doesn’t mean you are looking for a job on a fishing boat, after all.

Google is very clear about the fact that it doesn’t want to directly compete with Monster, CareerBuilder and similar sites. It currently has no plans to let employers posts jobs directly to its jobs search engine for example (though that would surely be lucrative). “We want to do what we do best: search,” Zakrasek said. “We want the players in the ecosystem to be more successful.” Anything beyond that is not in Google’s wheelhouse, he added.

Make no mistake, however: This is surely a competitive move by Google. “Job search is the next step in Google’s march toward gaining marketshare in what’s becoming a very competitive landscape of very large tech companies,” Joel Cheesman asserts at ERE, pointing to the still-mysterious Google Hire applicant tracking system he caught wind of in April. And while Google is partnering with job listing sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Monster, the leading job search site Indeed is conspicuously absent from the list of partners:

Once touting itself as “Google for jobs,” Indeed now gets to deal with Google being the Google for jobs. … “Big companies like Google will keep trying until they get job search right,” added Paul D’Arcy, Indeed’s SVP of marketing. D’Arcy added that jobs posted natively on Indeed would not be searchable in Google’s new offering, which hints at one of Indeed’s strategies to combat this new competitor.

Worried that your jobs won’t be listed in Google’s index? If so, Google has made open documentation available for developers at third-party platforms or direct employers, both big and small. Time will tell if Google will start giving preferential treatment to uploads from direct employers versus postings on a job board. In the early days of Indeed, job boards enjoyed the free and easy traffic. As time went on, however, postings on employer sites received the lion’s share of traffic, forcing job sites to pay for traffic.