Will You Hire Your Next Top Employee With Facebook Jobs?

Facebook has a long history of going after their competition, challenging them with new Facebook features, or simply acquiring their whole business—see Instagram, Whatsapp, and 61 other acquisitions in Facebook’s lifespan.

Now, Facebook is taking a stab at LinkedIn’s niche, letting businesses and organizations post job openings and take user applications directly on Facebook.

Could this new Facebook feature be a game-changer for your small business?

Here’s what you need to know about Facebook Jobs.

Taking the Pain Out of Hiring

Facebook announced on Wednesday that the inspiration of their new job posting feature actually come from small business itself:

“40% of U.S. 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,” Facebook wrote on their business blog.

With the new jobs feature, Facebook intends to make hiring easier for that 40% of small business owners who find hiring challenging.

With over 1 billion users visiting Facebook’s Pages, they know that business owners and the workforce already use Facebook to find jobs.

Now, they’re making that relationship official: Administrators of “Pages” can now post job openings, and Facebook users can apply directly on Facebook.

Facebook Jobs: How It Works

Want to get in on the potentially game-changing way to recruit top talent for your business?

It’s easy to do so.

Through the new feature, businesses can post job updates with title, role description, “part-time” vs. “full-time,” and so on to their official page just as easily as they would post a normal update. That job listing will go live on both your business’s official page and in the new “Jobs” section.

On the other end, the user can scroll through that Jobs bookmark, or they could come across the job posting directly on your website. They can also filter their search to a 2- to 100-mile radius from their location and filter by industry. Once they’ve stumbled across your job posting, all they have to do is click “Apply Now.”

This leads them to a pre-populated page with your name, education history, hometown, current city, employment history, and so on—essentially anything the user has made public on their Facebook profile.

The user doesn’t upload a résumé but instead sends your business a letter-style note of about 250 characters through Facebook Messenger. This is Facebook Jobs’ pseudo-cover letter, and the candidate’s chance to convince you that they’re the best person for the job.

Back to you, the Page administrator. Once you’ve posted your job listing and have received some of these submissions, you can track these applications all in one place.

You’ll be able to review your job applications and respond to candidates over Messenger, and boost your job listing to other audiences on Facebook if you’re not getting the visibility you’re looking for.

All in, it’s an intuitive and simple way to approach hiring for your small business. Check out the flow of posting a job description in Facebook’s video below.

What This Means for Facebook, and What this Means for Your Small Business

This is a huge deal for Facebook.

With more users engaging with higher intent on Facebook—and an added use of Facebook Messenger for businesses—Facebook will certainly benefit if the Jobs feature takes off.

Plus, Facebook could start earning additional revenue if Page administrators start paying to push job listings as they would a traditional Facebook ad.

But as a small business owner, you don’t have to pay for a Facebook Jobs posting. This puts Facebook at a huge advantage, considering that LinkedIn and SimplyHired do charge businesses for job postings.

And as a business owner, you might benefit in more ways than just finding your next “Employee of the Month” on Facebook. Businesses might roundup more followers to their Facebook page by posting their job openings. You’ll get more eyes—and potential followers—on your page regardless of whether people apply to your job posts.

Plus, when it comes down to it, almost everyone has a Facebook account—but not everyone has a LinkedIn profile. TechCrunch notes that while 467 million people use LinkedIn, 1.79 billion people are on Facebook. And those 1.79 billion people are much more active users than those LinkedIn users are.

By posting your job listings on Facebook, you’ll get more traffic on your job openings—and certainly more bang for your buck if you don’t pay too much to push your listing.

What’s Next for Facebook Jobs

So far, Facebook’s new Jobs feature is catching on with local, family-owned small businesses.

The feature is still in testing mode, and it’s unclear whether Facebook Jobs will take over LinkedIn’s core customer base.

But as testing goes on, there’s a whole roll-out of new features to come.

Stay tuned for new features and add-ons, but in the meantime, why not post your next job listing on Facebook? Posting a job listing is completely free, and who knows—your next best employee might stumble across your post!

The post Will You Hire Your Next Top Employee With Facebook Jobs? appeared first on Fundera Ledger.

from Fundera Ledger https://www.fundera.com/blog/facebook-jobs