Big news came from Facebook: the largest social network in the world enters the 400 billion-worth market of job search and recruitment!
I’m not sure about others, but this is where my excitement ends. I think Facebook just blew it.
First of all, Facebook should do better.
A leader of dot-com revolution 2.0 with market cap of $100 billion and a billion users collected in eight years enters one of the biggest and a highly fragmented markets and gives us … a job board.
Could we expect more from them, after working days and nights for couple of last months minimum? Definitely, we should.
It’s not the right place or time to discuss specific ideas (not for free at least — you hear me Mark?) but what Facebook did here is like improving the old-school Walkman when there are iPods available.
There’s no revolution.
Imagine you have personal data on billion people around the world. You know almost everything about their day-to-day activities (creepy, isn’t it?). Lots of them provide full employment history as well. Though only 22% are over 45, it means 220 million people anyway (LinkedIn has 175 million users in total!).
Would you really apply the slightly extended solution Monster has offered for years? I highly doubt that.
Social network should really go social.
Ninety-percent of candidates are not engaged in job searches anymore. The future of recruitment is social – it’s all about reaching the passive candidates, building relationships and communities.
Facebook claims its users have on average 229 connections and show high level of daily engagement. Great. Or rather, great potential.
Aggregating job offers and adding a ‘like’ button to them (not a novelty in this business…) is nowhere near making the full use of that potential.
Now, the curious thing is that it will work.
Why do they do it after all? For money. Can this bring money? Hell yeah. Mission accomplished.
Facebook’s stock price rose over 12% yesterday, reflecting investors’ optimism on how the new feature should impact the company’s bottom line. The mass is simply too huge for the idea to fail. Even though it’s seriously flawed.
On the other hand, I think that’s not all.
At least I hope it isn’t.
I entered the recruitment business myself because I believe it’s broken. It’s utterly inefficient and should be fixed for the sake of all of us.
There are very few companies that have resources to change it but Facebook certainly is among them. Wasting this potential with a job aggregator would be a mistake we cannot afford.