The fear of a job recruiter stalking your Facebook account just got shook up.
Starting Wednesday, Facebook users can apply to a job directly on the social network. So if you’re browsing Facebook all day because your job is boring, you’re really in luck with this new feature.
Facebook Pages in the U.S. and Canada can now put up a job posting just as they would “a photo or a cat video,” Facebook exec Andrew Bosworth said with a smile as he presented his pitch deck to Mashable. The user then simply taps a few buttons to apply.
Cat videos are fun. Jobs … quite serious. And it’s a serious endeavor for Facebook, which has come a long way from organizing college parties to helping small business owners navigate the internet.
It makes sense that Facebook would get into the market. There are 65 million Facebook Pages, and all of them within the U.S. and Canada will now be able to post about open positions on Facebook. Serious employers typically link to third-party job sites like LinkedIn or Glassdoor. This new feature eliminates those steps and keep you — the job applicant and the hiring manager — inside Facebook, just as CEO Mark Zuckerberg hoped.
Job applicants can see a list of jobs on facebook.com/jobs, a new jobs tab on the mobile app or directly on pages. You can filter the jobs based on type of business.
The whole process can be done on desktop or mobile. A Facebook user could see a job posting on their News Feed or go to a page. Some information will be pre-filled.
- Name
- City
- Phone Number (if you have it listed on Facebook)
And then you can fill in a 1000-character box on “Why you think you’re a good candidate?” The last part lists your experience, which can also be pulled from your Facebook profile, and education. Each of those areas can be edited in case of errors.
The rest of the process, such as scheduling an interview and even the interview itself, can then be conducted completely through Facebook Messenger.
Hiring managers can then track that experience on their Facebook Pages.
To quell your immediate fear, a hiring manager will not be directed to anything else in your Facebook Page. Your privacy settings are still yours to control.
Facebook didn’t have any specific launch partners for the feature, but it has been testing the product in Chicago since last year.
The experience was first tossed around in the early days of Facebook when Pages were first created, but ended up getting put on the product roadmap in spring of 2016. The build started in June and then it began testing in August.
“We wanted to take the work out of hiring,” Bosworth said. “We started doing the research on powering every day life, event ticketing, ordering food or these everyday tasks that people have to work through.”
For Bosworth, who was one of leads behind the Facebook News Feed (what we all love to hate), the jobs feature is crucial for his other product baby, Facebook Pages.
“With the Pages product, the mission is to connect every voice to its audience. We assumed that the number one need the business has is to hire people,” he said.
It’s Facebook’s latest step to offer more enterprise tools, and not just consumer features. Facebook Workplace, once referred to as Facebook at Work, was released last year as a work management system for companies.
It doesn’t cost anything for a Page to put up a job posting, but business owners can choose to make a job posting an ad on News Feed. For now, Facebook isn’t taking a referral cut.
As to job standards? The posting applies to the same Community Standards of anything on Facebook.
It’s the first rollout of much more to come — at least if Facebook considers the feature to be successful enough. For instance, the template is standard for all businesses, no matter the type of position. In the future, applications could be expanded with attached media, like a resume and a video.
