Facebook is getting bigger and bigger each day. An article by the WallStreet Journal - Recruiters troll Facebook for Candidates They Like, talked about how recruiters are turning to social platforms to recruit candidates for jobs. According to Jobs2Web, Facebook hires account for less than 1% of the total hires companies are making. Matt Mund, vice president of product development for Monsters.com acknowledged that Facebook as a recruiting platform is growing rapidly. Granted Facebook doesn't really have a recruiting tool like LinkedIn, but they do allow companies to have their own page which the companies can post jobs on it. Sharing and referring a job to a friend is as simple as clicking the like button.
On the other hand, Jeff Weiner, CEO of LinkedIn doesn't seem to worry about this because he believes candidates will want to separate their professional and personal I think Jeff Weiner needs to be a little careful with his statement because we're not going to know what is going to happen in the next 5 years. If Facebook decided to get into the business of proving tools for recruiters, I think job posting sites like Monsters.com and possibly LinkedIn.com may need to fight harder to co-exist in this space. I see this as a win win for Facebook; continue to keep their community engaged while generating revenue from a different channel. I mean, if you like your job now, how often do you get on LinkedIn vs Facebook?
2 comments:
I'm a little skeptical about the idea of Facebook becoming a leading hiring tool. In that sense, I must agree with the people from Linkedin when they say that people want to separate their personal life and their professional life.
I definitely feel that LinkedIn is the better tool for searching and eventually hiring. It is true that it's becoming more and more difficult to ignore Facebook and its 600M or so users but I still think that it has been targeting a different segment and has a different purpose. LinkedIn is definitely more professional and polished. I also feel that Facebook site is not very efficient/"user friendly" for employee search.
In fact, LinkedIn and Facebook complement each other well and are to be used in conjunction with each other; the first to check professional backgrounds and the latter for personal backgrounds
I agree with nachoa18 that FB and social networks for professional interactions should coexist. A recruiter cannot rely solely on info from FB or from LinkedIN (or Monster). They show the two sides of the same coin (the potential candidate). Therefore FB and LinkedIN do not have to worry about each other in this context too much...
However there is an unexpected new player on the market. If it wanted to, Google+ with its circles based grouping could integrate the benefits of FB and LinkedIN into one service. We could manage our professional and personal networks from the same service, while the two would be well separated from each other. If we want however, by having everyone in the same service, we could exploit some synergies between the two sub-networks, allowing links between certain nodes.
We will see if Google agrees with my statement and takes on FB and LInkedIn. For sure not before it reaches a couple of hundred million users. However that day might not be too far away...
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