Facebook is taking on LinkedIn by letting businesses post job listings (FB, MSFT)

pulse

February 15, 2017 8:34 PM

Starting Friday, US businesses on Facebook will be able to post open job listings natively to their pages and in the News Feed.

Facebook is going after LinkedIn, Glassdoor, and other job listing sites.

Starting Wednesday, US businesses on Facebook will be able to post open job listings natively to their pages and in the News Feed.

Facebook's VP of Ads, Andrew Bosworth, told Business Insider that the feature is rolling out after a Facebook-commissioned survey of small business owners in the US that showed the hardest problem they had is finding the right people to hire.

"They actually put that ahead of finding new customers and getting sales," he said.

Once a Facebook page posts a job listing directly to its page, anyone who visits that page will see the option to apply. To speed up the process, Facebook will offer to autofill application information, like a person's name and location, from an applicant's profile. Employers will be able to respond to applicants through Messenger.

Facebook will let businesses pay to boost the reach of their listings to specific demographics, and listings will also show up in the News Feed for people who have liked a business's page.

The new jobs feature will pit Facebook against LinkedIn, the social network for professionals, which was recently acquired by Microsoft.

Despite the prevalence of existing job sites, Bosworth said that Facebook saw an opportunity to capitalize on the behavior that was already happening on its network.

"Pages were already making these posts, they were just doing it ad-hoc," he said. "We're bringing a little structure to it... It's a super lightweight approach to try and connect employers and employees."

pulse