Facebook launches job posting feature
Businesses can promote openings in News Feeds
Facebook Inc. is rolling out a new feature for Canadian and U.S. businesses that will let them post jobs directly on the world’s largest social media network, a move that places LinkedIn Corp. in the line of fire.
Called Jobs, the new feature gives businesses access to the hundreds of millions of Facebook daily users in both countries and the ability to promote job postings directly in people’s News Feeds like articles, photos and other content. Job seekers can visit the business page of a company they’d like to work for and see if there are any available openings, or they can visit the Jobs bookmark page, which will show all posted positions nearby with the ability to sort by industry and job type.
“We see a lot of small- to-medium sized businesses who have Pages and posting jobs on Facebook already, and we are seeing (many people) interact with them,” San Franciso-based Benji Shomair, Facebook’s global head of Pages, said in an interview.
“So the genesis of this work is really just to make something that is already happening on Facebook easier and reduce the friction there.”
When a jobseeker sees a position they want to apply for on a company’s Facebook page, they can now hit a button and a form will appear in a pop-up window that’s already filled out with information pulled from the user’s Facebook account. Only data the user has made available to the public through Facebook’s privacy settings will be loaded into the form and the job seeker can then change, add or remove information before sending.
“The way the connection is made between the person and the business is through a Facebook message, so it opens a Messenger thread with the application sent from the person to the business for that job,” Shomair said.
Though LinkedIn is often considered as the leading professional network for recruiting, users still need to create an account there to fully use its job-seeking functionality.
Facebook adding its own set of career-related tools means businesses can now post jobs in a place in which a highly engaged audience already exists and with fully formed accounts that makes the application process simple.
Data from ADP Research Institute shows that 40 per cent of U.S. small businesses say that filling jobs was more difficult than expected, despite employing nearly half of the country’s workforce. Meanwhile, one-third of job seekers use social media as a primary search tool, according to research by the recruiting software-maker Jobvite.
“We are very much led by our companies and trying to meet their needs and the way they are using our platform,” said Shomair.
The new Jobs feature can only be accessed on desktop and mobile by businesses and users in Canada and the U.S. as large test markets. Eventually it will roll out globally, though the company wouldn’t give a specific timeline of when that would happen.
The genesis of this work is really just to make something that is already happening on Facebook easier and reduce the friction there.