Facebook

It was more a question of when, rather than would. Facebook’s awesome reach and the amount of time people spend using it made it the perfect candidate for one and all social experiences — even when you are talking about finding jobs. The company realizes that and towards the same, is publicly rolling out a string of brand new job-related features that have been under test since last year.

Announcing the features, Facebook said:

We know that finding the right talent can be a challenge. 40% of US small businesses report that filling jobs was more difficult than they expected, which is surprising when you consider that these small businesses also employ nearly half of the country’s workforce.1

The update is pretty huge and will allow recruiters to post and hire directly through Facebook, rather than moving to LlinkedIn or some other platform. Let’s take a look at the new features.

Job openings through business pages:

So this is probably the biggest feature that is being rolled out today. Businesses can now leverage the reach of their Facebook pages to create and post job openings. The jobs can be viewed on the page itself. So basically, If I ran a Facebook page and wanted to fill a position, all that I would need to do is create a job opening. The opening would also be visible to whoever visits the page.

Facebook

As per Facebook:

It’s easy for Page admins to create a job post, track applications and communicate directly with applicants. After posting a job, Page admins will be able to review applications and contact applicants on Messenger, all on mobile and all in one place. And as with other posts, they can boost job posts to reach a larger or more relevant audience.

Apart from being simple for the poster, the experience of applying for a particular job is pretty straightforward as well. Job posts could appear  in various places — just like the other items on the feed, in the new bookmark for jobs, or even alongside other posts on business Pages. Once you see one that you like, simply click on the Apply Now button.
Doing so will open a form pre-populated with information from your Facebook profile — saving you further trouble. However, you can easily change the information before submitting the form to the prospective employer.
Facebook
The feature is currently being made available to prospective employers in the US and the Canada.

Meanwhile, Facebook has a couple of advantages over LinkedIn. One is of course, the audience reach. Facebook has almost 2 billion users — four times that of LinkedIn and making it much more easier to get your voice across to more users. Next, is the fact that many people are not even aware of the fact that they could be open to a change in their employment.

By making applying to jobs literally as easy as one click/tap, this new feature could help a lot of people take the plunge and apply for some cool new positions.

Finally, there is scope for a lot more, considering that Facebook could leverage its platform to do things like: Presenting specific jobs before specific people, looking in your friend list to determine who could be the best fit for a position and so on. And of course, this marks yet another possible revenue stream for Facebook as companies would be able to spend money to sponsor their job postings and make it reach more people.
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