As part of this effort, a page called “Social Jobs” was launched that hosts resources and content designed to help job seekers and employers. Facebook will promote the Social Jobs Page in the 10 states with the highest unemployment rate.
"Linking American job seekers with the resources they need to get back to work is a top priority of the Obama Administration and my department," said U.S. Secretary of Labor Hilda L. Solis in a statement. "By leveraging the power of the social web, this initiative will provide immediate, meaningful and ready-to-use information for job seekers and employers, and a modern platform to better connect them."
Their decision is most likely a result of data pointing to social media as a leading source for job hunters and recruiters. According to a Jobville poll, 92% of respondents have recruited or plan to recruit via social networks.
Despite the fact that one of the primary functions of Linkedin is to facilitate job-hunting, Facebook has been chosen by the government as the first social network to become involved with the initiative.
Solis confirms, however, that the U.S. Dept. of Labor will be reaching out to Linkedin and Twitter to join the initiative in the future.
In the meantime, it sounds as if Facebook may be expanding their current job offerings section in the Marketplace to echo something more similar to LInkedin.
The Social Jobs page says that Facebook will “explore and develop systems where new job postings can be delivered virally through the Facebook site at no charge.”
An article in Mashable speculates that a job board on Facebook could make them a serious competitor with Linkedin and Monster.com.
It should be noted, however, that Facebook has had a jobs section in the Marketplace for many years without causing much threat to those other career-focused sites.
But I am sure that they are hoping to become a bigger competitor for Linkedin in the future.
Yet, Linkedin provides something very important that Facebook cannot provide, save a major overhaul.
LinkedIn’s sole purpose is professional networking and people create their identities on the site with that in mind. If Facebook could provide a way for users to have multiple profiles under one name – a way to show one profile to friends and another to professional contacts – then they may pose a more serious threat.
Until they do that, however, they do have some major advantages in terms of what they can provide the government in this endeavor. For one, they have their enormous user base.
They plan to use their large population of users to conduct in-depth surveys and research about how job seekers, career centers, and recruiters use social media in the job hunt process.
This could prove a valuable tool for the government in figuring out the unemployment issue, possibly revealing which regions have the greatest issues and which industries have the biggest supply and demand issues.
Depending on the quality of information they can gather, the endeavor could prove extremely important in both future policy and in the future development of Facebook.
“We’re not going to limit ourselves to what’s possible today,” said one of the site’s spokespeople to Mashable. “Instead, we’re going to devote resources to develop the innovations that are going to help the job seekers of tomorrow.”
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