Original post by Josh Bersin via Forbes
There was an amazing amount of press last weekabout Facebook’s new social jobs app, even forcing LinkedIn’s stock down a few percent. What exactly is it and will it matter?
The Facebook Opportunity in Recruiting
Well first of all, it’s important to realize that Facebook does have a huge opportunity to make money in the recruiting space, with business models similar to LinkedIn. And today the company is selling plenty of recruitment advertising (we don’t know what percent of its ad revenue is from recruiting, but with nearly 1 billion users there’s plenty of opportunity).
Remember that the recruiting industry, which consists of over $130 billion spent on products and services to help employers find people, is all about “finding the right candidate.” And with so many people actively sharing all their personal information on Facebook, there are a lot of opportunities for companies (Facebook and others) to develop tools to help recruiters find those candidates (and vice versa).
The real business model in recruiting today is not candidates paying to put their resume online, but rather building fantastic search tools to help corporate recruiters find just the right people. We like to call this market “TheGoogle of People” – and a variety of smart companies are working on this now. LinkedIn has built amazing tools in this market, and is now on a runrate to generate a billion dollars in talent management revenue next year.
That all said, going after this market takes intense focus (it’s a complex and highly competitive space), and it does not appear that Facebook is there yet.
The Social Jobs App (or “Partnership”)
The Facebook Social Jobs Application (or Partnership) today is an aggregated search tool that lets candidates search job postings among five of Facebook’s application partners (Monster, BranchOut, Work4Labs, US.jobs, andJobvite). While this sounds like a good idea, it isn’t executed well.
When you use this application, you essentially type a search term into the box and select which of the five organizations you want to search from. And as you can see from the promotional page above, Facebook is promoting the total number of jobs in the system.
Well if you try the app (click here to try it out), you find it to be a fairly poorly implemented search system which doesn’t even come close to the services offered by LinkedIn or Indeed.com (Indeed is one of the most successful job aggregation systems in the market).
Today it has several challenges.
First, you have to select which job source you want to search (which more or less makes the system frustrating, since each of these five providers reaches different and overlapping parts of the market). So when you do search, it’s very confusing where to go.
We’re excited to announce we’re holding our New York City, US Job Fair on November 29.
Find out more information by visting the NYC Jobfair page.
