New Facebook Job Postings
On Monday, Facebook announced it was testing a feature to create and promote job postings on business Pages. The immediate industry reaction is that it may become a massive competitor to LinkedIn and do a much better job at acquiring the attention of passive seekers.
The preliminary information leaves me with many questions and some concerns. This is a big shift for Facebook — are they up to the job?
What they will have to get right from the start:
- Page Admins: If this tab is on a corporate Facebook Page, marketing teams will have to see the value and allow HR people to become Page admins to create/ promote the jobs (insert snarky comment here).
- The Apply: The applications will come in through Facebook messages. I can just see the marketing teams receiving the message along with customer inquiries and sending a generic message to thank them and then ask them to apply online, making for a disastrous candidate experience.
- Jobs Tab: The new job postings will be in a separate tab which will likely reside on a corporate Facebook Page. Job tabs have been notoriously unsuccessful in the past as they require the seeker to navigate to the Facebook Page wall and then click on the tab. Both are unlikely as only 2% of your Fans will ever come to your Page after liking it and Facebook tabs are only .4% of total organic impressions. Viewers see most posts in their newsfeed as defined by Facebook’s newsfeed algorithm, which is why marketers use paid ads to push content to their target audience, instead of relying on their audience navigating to them.
- Option to Promote Jobs: Recruitment teams currently have every opportunity to use Facebook’s advanced targeting to promote their employment brand and jobs to their target personas. How will these advertisements be different? Are they just simplifying the process for non-market savvy recruitment teams at a higher cost?
Facebook generally gets new endeavors right so I imagine they are consulting heavily with recruitment experts as well as their own SEO/SEM team. Only time will tell if it will indeed take down LinkedIn or fall flat with recruitment teams who have been slow to warm up to using Facebook as hiring platform.
More importantly, how does this impact your LinkedIn Company Page and job posting strategy on that platform? As Steve Levy points out, Facebook is looking and acting a whole lot like LinkedIn. Will you be adding more Facebook job advertising and promoted posts into your recruiting budget in the next quarter and in 2017?
