Why I don’t use the Facebook Jobs option
*** UPDATE July 2020 *** Times have changed and so does social media. I have instructed my team to begin posting on the Facebook Jobs platform.
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Lately, I have noticed that Facebook is aggressively pushing me to post our vacancies in their Jobs platform — but I don’t.
I love technology, new and old. I love everything about it. Before I came to HR Innovate, I spent my weekends and free time teaching myself how to code and build small robots. I love taking existing resources and pushing them to the edge squeezing every last drop of juice potential out of a project. This is why all of my robots are broken and in pieces.
So when I came to HR Innovate, a recruiting agency based in Cyprus, in 2018 the first thing I did was a digital asset inventory. What do we have? How do we maximize it? What do we want? And, ultimately, how do we get there?
I began tracking and crunching numbers. And at the end of almost every rabbit hole, what did I find? Facebook.
It aggravated me that here we are with this phenomenal service and team, but no one knew. How do I get people to know who we are? How do I get people to know what we do? How can we help them to further their career aspirations and in some small way contribute to a better society? Facebook.
Whatever your feels are about the platform, and let me insert here that as a Gen X-er I have some feels about it, at the end of the day when I go to the beach, when I go to the pub, when I go out to dinner, I take a look around me and what do I see? People looking at their phones. Facebook.
Armed with this information, I used my logic exercise Father Alvey taught me back in the 90’s.
I have jobs and I want people to see.
People see Facebook and Facebook has a Job platform
I have jobs -> Facebook Jobs
Simple enough.
I began to post our vacancies on the job platform and almost immediately received the wrong type of attention. No applications, under qualified applications and the last straw for me was a joke application from a friend. It felt as though I were being mocked. In under a week, I pulled all our vacancies off the Jobs platform preferring to post them rather as status updates. And I don’t post them all or immediately.
Instead, I use it as a teaser — like look, this is the kind of stuff we do, if someone wants to passively see news and vacancies, they are invited to like our page to see more but if they are actively job seeking, they are encouraged to check out our website.
Of course, being obsessive about my work, I rolled it around in my head for probably longer than necessary, and came to the conclusion that the type of vacancy we offer just doesn’t fit with the platform, which I should have seen a mile away. As I scroll through the Job platform, I see vacancies for waiters, cooks and cruise jobs. And I want to be clear that I fully respect all work, but its just not the type of vacancy we post. We post jobs in High Finance and Mobile Technology Development, Health Tech and Accounting. It just doesn’t fit.
Technology trends are evolving at an exponential rate and I look forward to the AI boom I expect to see in 2019 — put your helmets on — and I try to keep a finger on the pulse of what is happening, but for now, I won’t be posting any job vacancies on Facebook Jobs.
Addendum
*As I was drafting this article, Facebook is trying harder and harder to convert our posts into active job vacancies. I can only imagine that there will be many new job types in the near future on this platform and that the algorithms will catch up to me soon enough.
* I love how fast this all goes.. News from TechCrunch — Nov 13, 2018
Facebook takes on LinkedIn as a career portal with e-learning, expanded mentorship and jobs features
*July 2020. HR Innovate fully engages Facebook Jobs — and Groups.
