Google for Jobs best practice for Job Boards?

[gracekimberley1]

I head up SEO for a niche job board. We disallowed our job ad pages (/job/) in the robots.txt as this is user-generated content and really eating up our crawl budget, causing penalties etc.

Now Google for Jobs has hit the UK (our strongest region for traffic), I'm torn about what to do next.

Our jobs will only show in GfJ if we remove the jobs pages from the robots.txt and apply the directed structured data to every single jobs page and monitor this constantly. I will also have to constantly invest in our website developers no indexing / canonicalizing new job pages and paginations.

Is GfJ worth it? I have spoken to one other job board who has seen more brand awareness from appearing in GfJ but almost no traffic / application increase. But are we missing a trick here?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.