Hire My Friend to Work For Us.
Sorry if that sounds like a weird request, but I just couldn’t resist the verbal mashup of two, sort of new Facebook apps.
The apps address employment from opposite sides, and in that sense, they are sides of the same coin. Hire My Friend helps your Facebook friends spread the word about their job hunt. Work For Us lets employers post their jobs to their Facebook pages.
Now if only there was an app that matched the Work For Us jobs to the friends who want to be hired. Oh wait. There is. Jobvite Source does that for jobs, matching the opportunity to employees and friends and tracking these posts (Jobvites) as they get passed along.
Work For Us is different only in that it doesn’t do any matching or tracking. What it does, and does very well, is to post job openings to a company Facebook page, producing a job list that bears a striking resemblance to a bland job board post.
For that you’ll pay $9 a month for five job posts or a few hundred a month for unlimited posts. There’s a free version that lets you post one job at a time.
TechCrunch, which wrote about this last week, says the Work4Labs, the startup that built the app, has already got 2,000 companies to download the app.
It works this way: You sign-up either as the friend in need or the friend who helps out. Answer a few questions about the job seeker to create a mini-profile, provide a LinkedIn address, and connect it up to your Facebook page (or ask your friend to do so). It creates a status post that notifies your network.
It’s a clever idea, though it will be interesting to see if it gains much traction. I’m thinking there might one or two good friends for whom I might do this, but I sure wouldn’t want my Facebook wall to become a repository of job hunt requests. Of course, if other people take the same kind of care, then Hire My Friend as well as my friend in need benefit from this self-screening. In that way, it’s got the same sort of quality assurance going for it as a traditional employee referral program.