Facebook's newest feature is a direct threat to LinkedIn
Long gone are the days of printing out a physical copy of your resume and submitting it to a company you want to work for.
Of course, everything is digital now — and websites and job platforms are making it easier than ever to one-click apply to desired job roles with all of your information already input.
Salaries of employees at 25 top tech companies:
Throw in the accessibility of being able to do all of the above on a social media platform you’re already using every day, and the process of applying to jobs is forever changed.
Thanks to Facebook’s Jobs feature, this has become a reality — and the company just revealed that they’ll be expanding the service to more than 40 countries.
The Jobs feature, which launched last year, has constantly been in the process of being updated and expanding upon, including the ability for businesses to schedule interviews and job seekers to set up job alerts for new postings on roles that fit with what they’re searching for through the social media platform.
Take a look at Jobs in action:
New research conducted by Morning Consult found that in a poll of 5,000 adults in the US, a startling one in four people said that they searched for or found a job using Facebook.
VP of Local at Facebook, Alex Himel, elaborated:
“We’ve just seen all this organic activity on Facebook where people were using it already to find work — if you’re a job seeker or an employer trying to hire people — we saw pages making posts where they were posting about a job they were trying to fill, we’ve seen this job seeker groups spring up — and the product we’ve built is pretty simple. If you’ve used it, it connects people over Messenger, it’s very lightweight it’s simple, it’s easy, it’s free. And all we’re trying to do is take something that people were already trying to do, that we know is really important to people and businesses, and just make that easier for them.”
Facebook's Jobs feature is a game changer for both businesses and job seekers alike, and its user-friendly technology is a major part of that.
Job seekers can simply visit the Jobs page and begin filling out an application for whichever job they select, with information automatically pooling in from their Facebook profiles. The page will then open a Messenger conversation between the business and the job seeker, allowing instant access and communication between the job seeker and employer — something that’s been virtually unheard of until now.
But for social media mavens and those familiar (and comfortable) with Facebook, the move into casual conversations over messenger just seemed organic — and Himel agrees:
“I think the audience we're billing for is just the people use our platform. We’ve got 70 million active businesses (a lot of those are local businesses), and we have 2 billion users on our platform. Certainly, there are sites that exist today that are great and we’ve partnered with some of them, but there are still businesses that remain that are unable to hire a lot of positions they want to fill and people are still looking for jobs. And we found that when we started doing this project, when we researched and surveyed the people using our platform, we found that a lot of people were just consistently looking for jobs, and better jobs. And we found that there was a need there, and that’s why we built this platform.”
Looks like 'slacking off' by aimlessly scrolling through Facebook is about to get a lot more productive.
