You may or may not have heard about Facebook’s recent entry into the job posting market. If you haven’t, that’s perfectly okay. Here at Kinetix, we’re always in the know and would love to break down what this means for your company or job hunting behavior. TechCrunch has a good write-up here on the new platform and how Facebook sees itself in the job search and posting space.
What are these new features?
Essentially, Facebook has created a new Jobs tab for companies to place on their business pages. Within that tab, companies can create new updates in a way that’s formatted specifically to the job seeker. Things like title, salary, and description will now be part of that posting so that users can immediately identify and differentiate a job listing from a typical status update. When a candidate applies to that posting, their application will be auto-populated with information pulled from their Facebook profile. The application will then be sent to the company as a message in Facebook’s Messenger app (a convenient way to force businesses to utilize that platform.)
Another feature Facebook has added is the ability to take those job postings and display them as ads on a targeted news feed or sidebar. Candidates can be targeted by demographics, behaviors, and interests. So instead of seeing ads for the latest and greatest smartphone, Facebook users will now be able to see targeted job postings in fields they may be interested in or a good fit for.
What does this mean for all the companies who have Facebook business pages?
First, we don’t think this is a direct challenge to LinkedIn’s status as the premier career-focused social network. While most users have some relevant job information on their Facebook profiles, few have their entire work history posted or use Facebook as a primary job search platform. LinkedIn is known as the primary career-focused social network (even though it’s becoming more and more like Facebook each day) and users navigate there expecting to network and look at open jobs. Even with Facebook having 3x the number of users that LinkedIn does, we can’t foresee LinkedIn’s dominance fading in the near-term.
We do believe however that the new job postings will be extremely beneficial to small businesses hiring in low volumes. Lots of small or local companies use Facebook on a daily basis to engage with their customers and are already posting the occasional update about opportunities they have available. This will allow them to separate their job listings and make it more convenient for them to receive and process applications. Larger companies that utilize an ATS or have 1000’s of positions posted at one time certainly won’t be able to keep up with all the applications coming through as messages. That puts an extra burden on their talent acquisition teams to process those in a way that makes sense for their organization. The use of ads will also allow small businesses to target their postings to the right candidates, potentially allowing for an easier hiring process.
The scoop:
While Facebook Jobs are certainly a tool to keep an eye on, we can’t quite recommend you pull everything off of LinkedIn just yet. If they eventually allow for ATS integration and make it more attractive to larger enterprises, it could be a direct competitor to LinkedIn in the career social network space. If you have any questions or comments, drop us a note below and we’ll get a dialogue going. We would love to hear your thoughts on this!