Earlier this month it was reported that Facebook is planning to launch its own job board later this summer. I’ve been slow to write about this as it’s hardly a big “wow” moment. Let’s be honest, privacy, user requirement and technical issues aside – why wouldn’t they?
It appears they won’t be creating their own job posting app – instead “aggregating the job postings from third-party providers, making them available for search by Facebook users”
For active job seekers (who want to job search whilst they socialise) I can see this being a good thing. One in every seven minutes online and three out of every four minutes on social networking sites are spent on Facebook, according to a fairly recent comScore report. It’d certainly be a lot easier for jobseekers to glance around their favourite social media site that have to go trawling careers pages, job boards and LinkedIn.
For recruiters already using the third party providers the new story talks about (BranchOut, Jobvite and Work4Labs) then the extra coverage this would bring should be welcome. Whether recruiters not already using the channel will welcome yet another place to advertise jobs….
However, group creation aside (and this is a brilliant recruitment tactic I will write about soon) it may be the only way that recruiters can use Facebook to directly recruit; Glen Cathey has just written a blog post about Searching Facebook for Sourcing and Recruiting. It’s a very comprehensive blog and well worth a read. Basically he concludes that Facebook certainly doesn’t encourage searching of their user base.
If your candidates are on Facebook and you want to fish where the fishes are watch this space!
I’d expect Facebook to treat jobs the same as property within marketplace by doing one big deal with an aggregator like oodle.com