Facebook Takes Aim (and Fires) at The Recruitment Sector

Facebook has announced its new jobs feature. To confirm, this isn’t Facebook for Work/Workplace by Facebook –  it’s Facebook formally entering the jobs market.
Facebook is constantly evolving, and while Facebook builds new features and gives people new ways of using the platform, they can’t change the way people choose to use those features. For instance, groups were never designed to be used as community marketplaces but a huge number of users certainly did use them as such. Facebook then reacted by creating new settings for buy and sell groups, and a building a marketplace into their mobile app.
Facebook moving to build job boards is fuelled by the same sentiment. While business Facebook pages aren’t explicitly designed for advertising job opportunities, people certainly have been posting them. Not only have people been posting jobs to Facebook but the community has responded well.

What About the Existing Facebook Job Tabs/Boards?

For several years, Careers tabs have been available for company Facebook pages through a range of third party companies (e.g. Work4) that built jobs apps. However, when the platform your product is built on decides it’s time to compete in your space, it’s probably safe to say that the writing’s on the wall. Facebook’s job board will have better integration with the Facebook advertising platform and it’s free.
One key note for recruiters to think about at this point is that this is not something Facebook is building for them. At first glance, it doesn’t look as though it will be very easy to pull jobs from a recruitment database onto your Facebook jobs tab. Making matters worse, you won’t be able to track applicants from Facebook very easily, since Facebook is expecting businesses to handle applications through Facebook Messenger. However, it’s likely only a matter of time before Facebook builds an API for their jobs tab to speak with third party databases

Will This Mean I Can Advertise Jobs on Facebook?

Well, you already can, and this is something we’ve been working with recruitment agencies to do for a while! The big difference with this announcement is that Facebook is now actively encouraging you do to this, and instead of taking the Facebook user off of the platform and onto your website, you can now have them apply to a role without leaving the ecosystem.
As we’ve been saying now for some time now, Facebook is changing. We can see this in the current demographics; people just aren’t using it like they did 5, or even 3 years, ago. While Messaging platforms such as WhatsApp and Snapchat (and to some extent Facebook Messenger) are for day to day interaction, Facebook has found another niche of passively keeping people in touch with one another, keeping you updated with news/interest groups and sharing life moments.
With careers being such a major part of most people’s lives, a new job definitely counts as a life moment. This has resulted in a rapid increase in the volume of Facebook users who list their job title and employer, and possibly other information, such as years of employment. Facebook is the undisputed social media leader in terms of user base, especially when compared with the likes of LinkedIn. These two factors coupled together make this announcement close to recruitment gold for savvy recruiters and recruitment agencies.

Great, let’s post a job

So, if you’re keen to try out Facebook Jobs, how do you get going? Well, the bad news is that although TechCrunch had the story confirmed by Facebook and had the Tab on their Page, the feature hasn’t seen a wide release as of yet. We manage upwards of 25 Facebook company pages across several countries, and none of these have changed.

What to expect

Well, at least to start with, posting a job is going to be free. The cost will come if you use the platform to pay to target the job out to specific Facebook users. Our experience to date had been that advertising on Facebook, when compared to job boards and LinkedIn, is pretty cheap. If you spend $100-200 ‘boosting’ your job, then depending on the role you’re likely to reach 5-10,000 targeted people.

What’s next

We’ll keep an eye out for the roll-out and let you know when the feature sees a wide release. If you’d like assistance getting your head around targeted social advertising for jobs, please feel free to get in touch.
Image: Shutterstock

This article first appeared on The Prominence Blog on November 11th, 2016.

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