Facebook
is planning to launch its own job board later this summer, said people
familiar with the matter. The job board will aggregate the job postings
of third party providers, making them available for search by Facebook
users.
While the people said the new effort doesn't yet signal
that Facebook is making a full-blown entry into the job recruiting
market, it does represent more of a threat to other professional
networking sites such as LinkedIn should the social networking giant get
more serious about the project.
At least three job posting
companies that currently leverage Facebook's platform will be involved
in the new offering, including BranchOut, Jobvite, and Work4 Labs, the
people said. Some partners have begun telling their clients about the
job board, which could launch as soon as early August. Initially,
Facebook doesn't plan to monetize the service, and it's unclear whether
the social network aims to do so in the future.
A Facebook
spokesman said, "We don't comment on rumor and speculation."
Spokespersons for BranchOut, JobVite and Work4Labs did not immediately
respond to requests for comment.
"It doesn't feel like a big
effort that they've worked on for a long time," said one person of the
new jobs effort. "It feels lightweight." The person speculated that the
effort was meant to drive user engagement on the site.
It's also
unclear whether Facebook will integrate the postings into its users'
news feed, or whether the postings will only exist in a standalone
section of the website. Facebook had a third-party developer create the
new site, said a person familiar with the matter.
In October, Facebook announced a partnership
with the U.S. Department of Labor and other partners to provide job
hunting resources. At the time, Facebook said that the "partnership will
explore and develop systems where new job postings can be delivered
virally through the Facebook site at no charge."
This new effort,
which is being seen by some as extension of the partnership with the
U.S. Department of Labor, could help give Facebook positive exposure in
an election year when concerns about unemployment are high, said one
person familiar with the matter. "If it takes off, they could devote
more resources to it," the person said.
In recent years, the
success of sites like LinkedIn, which merge users' personal and
professional histories with information about jobs, have put pressure on
once dominant sites like Monster.com. While job seekers once considered
sharing information on Facebook to be a liability when finding a job,
today a host of companies, including those partnering in the new job
board, have popped up promising to better match job seekers and
recruiters using profile information from Facebook users.
The global online job recruitment industry is estimated to be as big as $4.3 billion.
Companies and corporate recruiters already use Facebook to recruit new employees. Several large companies including Unilever, Boeing, Dell, Microsoft, Disney, PwC, and Wal-Mart
have Facebook career pages. Some have as many as 80,000 "Likes."
College students who want to get a job at a particular company often
choose to "Like" that company's recruitment page.
The job
postings business has been undergoing a restructuring since the
successful IPO of LinkedIn. Analysts expect generic job boards to become
less attractive to recruiters seeking high quality job candidates.
Two
types of job boards expected to gain include those that employ social
networking and those that target specific job seekers. On June 30, Dice Holdings agreed to buy FINS.com, a targeted job board with editorial content, from Dow Jones, a unit of News Corp., for an undisclosed sum.