Facebook Pulls A LinkedIn

Get ready to be serious on Facebook.

Have you ever thought of your favourite virtual haunt, Facebook, as a place where you could find your next job? No, right?

Well, Facebook already is host to a plethora of businesses — 65 million to be precise — that use its Pages product to showcase their wares and communicate easily and quickly with their customers.

Facebook maintains that it is more economical and sociable than maintaining a website — and that may well be true. Especially considering that having a thriving presence, sharing photos, content, customer citations and even new offers is just a matter of a few clicks. Also, unlike a website that needs people to visit it, Facebook takes your business to them, in a place that they spend a lot of their day consuming content.

However, Facebook has just begun to plug a gap that many business owners and employees have both been secretly hoping for. Facebook is rolling out the ability to list and apply for jobs — in a manner akin to services like LinkedIn, Indeed.com, Monster.com and Glassdoor — all through your personal (or your business’) Facebook page!

LinkedIn has dominated the employment scene ever since it launched 14 years ago — but has suffered slight setbacks on two counts.
LinkedIn has been unable to cater to two kinds of people — one, the lower-skilled workers and two, people who are not actively on job hunting spree.

“Two-thirds of job seekers are already employed,” says Facebook’s Vice President of Ads and Business Platform, Andrew “Boz” Bosworth. “They’re not spending their days and nights out there canvassing for jobs. They’re open to a job if a job comes.”

It seems Facebook has exploited these two vulnerabilities that LinkedIn has forever been saddled with. And with this, Facebook is poised at changing the entire game — writing new rules for it, by playing to it’s inherent strengths.

Excited? Well, Facebook is doing this strategically. It recently rolled out the new Jobs feature for users in the United States and Canada, enabling companies to post job openings either on their own page and/or on a new jobs page for free.

“Today we’re taking the work out of hiring by enabling job applications [directly] on Facebook. It’s early days but we’re excited to see how people use this simple tool to get the job they want and for businesses to get the help they need,” said Andrew Bosworth, the company’s vice president of business and platform.

Interested candidates would then be just a click away from potential employers as they can simply click the “Apply Now” button right on Facebook.
That done, their application will be sent through Facebook Messenger with Facebook having pre-filled the form with information like the applicant’s name, education background on the basis of user’s public profile etc.

That’s not all! Conversations between the parties could even happen directly through the Messenger, if so preferred. Though chatting with your potential employer through an instant messenger sounds a little unprofessional, it is in keeping with our times whereby texting is the most favoured mode of communication.

Job seekers can filter their job search as per factors like city or area, full-time or part-time preferences, and type of work.

Interestingly, for now Facebook is charging no fee for its service of advertising job positions or filling up forms for potential employees.

If you are a keen observer, then you might have noticed or known that Facebook was beta testing this feature of seeing job ads on Facebook for quite some time and now since it is rolling out the feature to US and Canada, it is pretty clear that the feature transpired to be pretty successful in its testing stage.

This feature will definitely bring in revenue to Facebook as businesses can pay to transform these posts into ads so that it can gather maximum eyeballs as the ads appear in the News Feed of a lot of people. Also, if users re-share the job vacancies to their friends or simply tag their friends in posts, it will end up garnering attention from a lot of people.

Facebook seems to be interested in roping in the business users and has been working in this direction as it has been pushing Facebook Workplace to its business users.

Facebook’s pitch of reaching millions of its active users who are looking for not just full time jobs but freelancing or part-time jobs looks imminently possible, as a lot of users come to Facebook every day for various reasons like infotainment and bragging to the world about their latest foreign trip.

There’s a catch with this entire matter — but I’m going to discuss that in a future article.

And no, I am not talking about the underlying assumption that users would like to use the same platform for serious stuff like looking for a job.

There’s a significant reason why some people would continue to head to to websites like LinkedIn to land up their dream job. We’ll cover this soon, promise.

LinkedIn dominates the employment scene but its 467 million user count definitely falls short in front of Facebook’s 1.86 billion active users. Add to that Facebook’s appeal to middle skilled or lower skilled workers — is definitely a mountain too tall for LinkedIn in it’s current avatar.

Whether this is the perfect recipe for success or not, only time will tell. That said, get your CV polished up… and your Facebook profile ;-)

Originally published at Chip-Monks.