Facebook Opens Mini Job Posts Portal

Facebook is turning a new leaf after having introduced video and live streaming to the platform. FB has turned its attention to other rival. This time, it’s taking on LinkedIn by introducing a new jobs search portal.

LinkedIn has ignored two huge chances which Facebook is now exploiting, helping non-professionals and people who not currently looking for employment.

Facebook said that companies in the United States of Americas and Canada will be able to post job openings, and their prospective employees can now find Job posts on the company Page or in the new jobs bookmark.

“We’re focused on building new ways to help make it easier for businesses to interact with the over one billion people visiting Pages every month. Businesses and people already use Facebook to fill and find jobs, so we’re rolling out new features that allow job posting and application directly on Facebook,” the company said.

Facebook said that seeing as potential employees may already spend a lot of their time online, it only makes sense help businesses find qualified people while they’re on social media and their mobiles.

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. When users see these, they can hit an “Apply Now” button to instantly send an application through Facebook Messenger. And as with other posts, they can boost job posts to reach a larger or more relevant audience.

image credit: techcrunch

According to Facebook, the feature helped fill a number of roles while it was in bate phase. Some job candidates are wary about employers doing background checks on their social media profiles. Applying directly through Facebook might make that even easier for a company.

Corporates already use Facebook site for sourcing, branding and posting paid ads.

For those looking for employment, job posts will appear in their News Feed, in the new bookmark for jobs, and alongside other posts on business Pages. When they click on the “Apply Now” button, a form will open that’s pre-populated with information from their profile on Facebook. Applicants can always review and edit their information before submitting it.

While it’s a good start, Facebook has a very long way before it catches up with LinkedIn which saw 6.5 million US jobs listed on its platform last year.

Facebook did not state when this would be rolling out internationally.

Facebook is not the only company gunning to the top job portal, Google has developed a new tool which can help in hiring. The Google Cloud Jobs API (application programming interface) uses machine learning to understand how job titles and skills relate to one another and which job description, location and seniority level are the closest match to a job seeker’s preferences.

“The goal of the API is to address the disparity among job titles, job descriptions and the skills needed that “comes from a lack of industry standards to define and describe occupations and how they align to specific skills,” according to Google.