When it comes to looking for work, today’s job seeker has more options than ever before. Not only are the traditional places still around, like newspaper classifieds, but the web has been flooded with an ever-increasing supply of new places to look. There are huge job boards, niche job boards, social job sites, employer’s career pages, and aggregators that try to list all of those jobs (in fact, there are enough of those to warrant the creation of an aggregator of the aggregators).

With all of those options on the table, it might seem strange that many people start their job search on the same site that they start every other search: Google. How many people, you ask? A lot of people. Possibly enough people for us to say most people.

We did some research using Google’s Keyword Tool, which provides estimated search volume numbers used for reference in creating PPC campaigns. The numbers we got back are pretty impressive. Here’s a few of the most popular queries (the numbers represent searches on Google and their Search Network for the month of June in the US only):

• jobs – 185,000,000
• CA jobs – 5,000,000
• manager jobs – 4,090,000
• part time jobs – 3,350,000
• engineer jobs – 2,740,000
• marketing jobs – 1,500,000
• construction jobs – 1,220,000
• healthcare jobs – 1,000,000

Just those 8 queries comprise over 200 million searches per month (by way of comparison, Compete.com reports that Monster.com had just over 40 million unique visitors in June). If you are an employer, recruiter, job board, or pretty much anyone else in the employment space, and you haven’t given some serious thought about your strategy to capture a piece of that action, you are missing an enormous opportunity.