Facebook to Enter Recruiting With a Job-Postings Board
This is a retelling, in our own words, of the Dow Jones newswire report published July 6, 2012.
Facebook was planning to launch its own job-postings board later that summer, according to people familiar with the matter — a board that would aggregate job listings from third-party providers and make them searchable by Facebook users.
The partners reportedly included at least three companies that already built on Facebook's platform: BranchOut, Jobvite, and Work4 Labs. Some had already begun telling clients about the board, which could launch as early as August. Initially, Facebook did not plan to monetize the service, and it was unclear whether it ever would.
The effort was described as lightweight — not a full-blown entry into the recruiting market, but enough of a threat to professional networking sites like LinkedIn to get attention. "It doesn't feel like a big effort that they've worked on for a long time," one person with knowledge of the project said. "It feels lightweight." The speculation was that Facebook wanted to drive user engagement.
The move was seen as an extension of Facebook's October 2011 partnership with the U.S. Labor Department to provide job-hunting resources on the site — a partnership that promised to explore delivering new job postings "virally through the Facebook site at no charge." In an election year dominated by worries about unemployment, a jobs board also offered Facebook welcome positive exposure.
The context was a recruiting industry in flux. LinkedIn's successful IPO had pressured once-dominant boards like Monster.com, and analysts expected generic job boards to fade while social and targeted boards gained. Facebook's career pages — run by companies like Unilever, Boeing, Dell, Microsoft, Disney, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and Walmart, some with tens of thousands of likes — already showed how the social network was becoming part of the hiring pipeline.
Facebook declined to comment on the report. (The project eventually materialized as the "Social Jobs" app later that year.)
Based on Dow Jones newswire reporting (July 6, 2012).
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