Facebook has features dedicated to fundraising, small businesses, gaming, news, live video, food delivery, and more. And in November 2016, they began unrolling a new feature, Facebook Jobs, which helps businesses searching for candidates spread their job openings across social networks while letting job seekers apply directly through Facebook, with no need for a resume or cover letter. Since 2016, Facebook Jobs has steadily grown; as of August, Facebook’s job application tab is accessible worldwide.
Facebook is one of the world’s most influential companies, and their move into recruiting reflects how the job hunt is changing for job-seekers and how the employee hunt is changing for employers. A close examination of the Facebook Jobs rollout reveals some dominant trends in the recruiting world. Let’s take a look at a few of those trends.
More Recruiting Tools For Small Businesses
Small businesses are revered as the economic lifeblood of America, yet their day-to-day reality is often competitive struggles against larger companies. These conditions extend to hiring. In a tight labor market, small businesses looking to attract and keep workers must face well-funded recruitment campaigns, signing bonuses, and even employee poaching from larger firms. In August 2017, companies with 500 or more employees added more than double the number of new workers gained by companies with under 50 employees.
Facebook has proven a boon to small businesses looking to advertise effectively and connect with their communities. So it makes sense that Facebook’s job platform would help them recruit employees, too. By connecting their job posts to their business pages, showing those posts in proximity job searches, reaching a vast range of passive and active local job candidates, and targeting posts to promising community members just as they target advertisements, small businesses can leverage their existing community–both online and in reality–to find workers. Facebook Jobs’ popularity will likely grow among small businesses, and it’s only a matter of time before competing platforms boost their efforts to tap this recruiting market too.
Mobile-Friendly Recruiting
Over 95% of Facebook users accessed the platform via smartphone as of January 2018. Facebook, like many social media sites, is an inherently mobile-oriented platform, and users of Facebook Jobs will be able to make posts, apply to openings, and communicate with candidates or potential employers via their mobile device. Like Facebook itself, smartphone usage is ubiquitous in modern life, and Facebook’s growing influence in the jobs world reflects the growing role of mobile devices for both passive and active candidates.
Data from Indeed shows that while mobile devices account for the majority of job searches in most occupations, mobile searches are particularly prominent in industries such as maintenance or construction, where workers looking to switch jobs are unlikely to be sitting at a desk. Mobile-friendly job search and application tools have been hailed as particularly millennial-friendly–although, Indeed points out that mobile search use is cross-generational. 73% of Gen X-ers used mobile to search for jobs in 2016; this not far from the 78% rate among millennials. But beyond reaching millennial candidates, the importance of mobile applications for companies looking to hire blue collar workers will only grow.
Recruiting Designed For Passive Candidates
In a tight labor market, many of the candidates that are perfect for an open position aren’t necessarily looking for a new job. But just because these candidates aren’t out there searching doesn’t mean that they’re a waste of time for recruiters. A LinkedIn study found that while only 30% of the global workforce identifies as actively job-seeking, 87% of the workforce is “open” to new job opportunities. These passive candidates may not be spending much time on traditional job search sites, but regardless they are using multi-purpose online services such as Facebook. Facebook’s 1.86 billion user base gives recruiters looking for passive candidates a far broader talent pool to search opposed to LinkedIn’s 467 million. As long as the tight labor market continues, platforms that help employees reach passive candidates and active candidates by tapping into existing social networks will thrive.
Candidate-Centric Recruitment
The growth of recruitment tech and strategies that help companies find and woo passive candidates reflects another general trend in hiring and recruiting, candidate-oriented job hunt platforms. In a tight labor market, active candidates who feel off-put by a company’s branding, non-intuitive technology, or time-wasting recruiting strategies can take their job search elsewhere. Facebook Jobs shows that companies must approach passive candidates themselves rather than waiting for those passive candidates to turn into active ones, and the emergence of other technological platforms shows that even recruiters who gain access to active candidates must earnestly work for those candidates’ trust and interest.
The blockchain hiring platform BHIRED.io takes an innovative approach to help recruiters and hiring managers to engage candidates. By building token incentives into their business model, BHIRED.io allows active candidates to build up their BHIRED.io rankings by adding verified skills, educational credentials, and work experiences to their profile. The more highly ranked a candidate, the more tokens recruiters and hiring managers have to pay to unlock their profile and initiate the hiring process. Candidates stay active and engaged on the platform until their job search is concluded due this token incentive, and tokens can be traded or used to unlock a variety of training and third-party services on the platform. On BHIRED.io, recruiters and hiring managers to gain access to a pool of engaged, active, and qualified candidates—a valuable thing in a tight labor market.
Will Facebook’s gamble of offering a “Jobs” feature succeed? Trends in the recruiting world show that they’re moving in the right direction; but other, more agile platforms could still triumph in this rapidly shifting arena.