How Employers Can Make Their Jobs and Company Show Up in AI Search

Picture a planning manager at a food manufacturer in Ohio who's been half-thinking about leaving for a year. She's not on Indeed every night. But one evening she types into ChatGPT, "which manufacturers around Columbus are actually good to work for in supply chain?" and reads whatever comes back. That answer, whether you like it or not, is now part of your employer brand, and I'd guess most supply chain employers have never looked at it.

So here's a practical way to look, and what to do about what you find. None of it needs a marketing department, by the way. If your HR lead is curious and can borrow an hour of the web person's time, that's most of the job done.

Why does AI search matter for hiring?

Mainly because the people you most want are the ones who aren't applying. SCOPE has written about how passive candidates make up most of the talent worth hiring in supply chain, and passive candidates are exactly who does their homework privately before they'd ever take a recruiter's call.

They're not comparing forty job ads side by side. They ask one question and read one answer, and if you're missing from it (or described in a way you'd barely recognise) you lose them without ever knowing they were interested.

There's a less obvious problem, too. If your own pages are thin, the assistant won't leave a blank. It'll grab whatever's lying around instead: maybe a Glassdoor thread from 2022, a local news piece about a plant closing, or that job ad you've reposted so often it looks like nobody wants it.

What do these assistants actually read?

Pretty much what a thorough candidate would read, only in a few seconds instead of an evening. Your careers page and the individual job pages. Listings on Indeed and LinkedIn. Glassdoor. Press coverage. Your company page on LinkedIn and whatever your own people post there.

None of this is about tricking a machine. It's closer to housekeeping: making sure the pages it's going to read anyway are clear, up to date, and specific enough to quote.

Start by asking it about yourself

Before you change a thing, go and see what's being said. Open ChatGPT, then Perplexity, then Gemini, and ask the kind of questions a candidate in your patch would type. "Is [your company] a good place to work in procurement?" "What do warehouse supervisors make at [your company] in [city]?" "Best logistics employers in [region]." "What's it like at the [site] distribution centre?"

Make a note of who gets mentioned, what's said about you, and (this is the useful bit) which websites the assistant cites. Those citations show you which pages are really shaping your reputation. In my experience it takes about thirty minutes and almost always turns up at least one surprise.

Check the website isn't shutting AI tools out

This sounds technical but it's a five-minute check. Some companies block AI crawlers across the whole site without anyone deciding to, usually through a security setting or a default in the careers software.

OpenAI is explicit about it: sites that block its search crawler, called OAI-SearchBot, won't be shown in ChatGPT search answers. Ask whoever looks after your website to check the robots.txt file and make sure the careers section is open. If your jobs sit on a separate subdomain run by your applicant tracking system, check that one as well, because it's often configured differently.

Get your job pages properly labelled

There's a format Google publishes for this, called JobPosting structured data. It's a bit of code behind each job page that spells out the title, location, salary, and closing date in a way search engines can't misread, and pages that include it become eligible for Google's job search experience. Cleanly labelled data like that is also easier for AI tools to pick up.

Most current applicant tracking systems can switch it on for you, so it's worth asking your provider. Once it's on, paste a couple of job links into Google's free Rich Results Test and you'll see straight away whether it's working. And if you only get around to two fields, I'd pick salary range and expiry date, because filled roles otherwise keep floating around in results for months.

Write job ads that say something

An ad that promises a "competitive salary in a dynamic, fast-paced environment" gives a candidate nothing to go on, and an AI assistant has even less. It can't summarise what isn't there.

Ads that get described accurately tend to be the specific ones. You'll usually see a pay range, the site and shift pattern, and the actual systems the person will live in (SAP, Oracle, Manhattan, Blue Yonder, whatever it is). The better ones even mention who the role reports to and what a good first six months would be. If a category manager asks an assistant which local companies are hiring people with SAP Ariba experience, you'll only come up if your ad actually mentions SAP Ariba.

Publish the answers recruiters give on first calls

Your recruiters could probably list the first-call questions in their sleep: how planners move up to manager, whether it's on-site or hybrid, how long people tend to stick around, what's changed since the acquisition.

Those answers belong on your careers page, written plainly. A short FAQ, a page about what a normal week at the DC looks like, a couple of quotes from people who've been promoted from within. That's exactly the kind of material assistants lift into their answers, and very few supply chain employers publish any of it today.

It's also worth asking who owns this internally, because it tends to fall between teams. When we went through roughly 1,000 marketing job posts for a recent study, skills in AI search visibility came up in about 1 in 80. If marketing teams are barely hiring for it, careers pages are unlikely to be anyone's priority, and talent acquisition may simply have to pick it up.

Tidy up the pages you don't own

A fair chunk of what an assistant says about you comes from sites you don't control, but you can still nudge them. Reply to Glassdoor reviews, particularly the reasonable critical ones. Take down old job ads rather than leaving them live; SCOPE has a good piece on why top candidates avoid reposted job openings, and those stale listings get picked up by AI summaries as well. Keep the LinkedIn page current too. A new facility, an internal promotion, an award: if it isn't written up somewhere public, then as far as an AI summary is concerned it never happened.

So how do you tell if any of this is working?

Go back to your original questions every couple of months, ask them again, and put the answers side by side. You're watching for whether your company gets named at all, whether what's said is accurate, and whether your own careers pages start turning up among the sources.

Don't expect a jump in a week. New pages take a while to be crawled and folded into answers. But each clear, specific page you put out gives an assistant one more decent source to draw on, and one less reason to lean on that review from three years ago. Very few of your competitors are doing any of this yet, which is the best argument for starting now.

About the author

Stefan Kalpachev is the founder of Content RevOps, a firm that works across data, automation, and content systems to help B2B companies with long, trust-led sales grow faster. He leads the company's research on how B2B sectors staff and run marketing, including studies of close to 2,000 education company websites and around 1,000 marketing job posts. Before Content RevOps, he worked on content and marketing for Pearson Online Learning and King's College London.