Is The Facebook Job Board The End Of Staffing As We Know It?

REM sings “It’s the End of the World as We Know It.” Depending upon whom you ask, it’s an appropriate song for both staffing agencies slow to adapt to social media, and competing social platforms, to listen to while pondering the recent launch of Facebook’s new job board, the Social Jobs Partnership.

For most agencies, the adoption of social media – in some capacity – is already part of staffing efforts.  The Social Jobs Partnership will likely have only moderate impact, as savvy agencies look for any edge they can to create better connections within a network of nearly 900 billion potential candidates.

Significantly impacted, however, will be those staffing agencies that have made minimal strides into social media.  These agencies, some of whom may not even yet have a dedicated Facebook page, will likely feel the ground move beneath their feet as they must take the advice to ‘get started with social media yesterday’ almost literally.

Another organization that will likely feel the world they know start to end, again – dependent on whom you ask – is LinkedIn.  As staffing agencies optimize their Facebook presence, questions surrounding LinkedIn’s relevance are beginning to surface.   LinkedIn’s base of 175 million college educated users varies significantly from Facebook.  However Facebook’s voluminous user base allows an almost unprecedented ability for demographic segmentation.

For example, even though only 22 percent of Facebook’s members are older than 45 years of age it equates to nearly 220 million people – more than LinkedIn’s entire network. Facebook’s Social Jobs Partnership is also proving initially successful at recruiting lower-skilled workers.  This could be a starting point for Facebook’s eventual movement upstream, which may reduce LinkedIn’s market share in the process.  Note that LinkedIn’s distinct advantage, ie, its ability to support connections with more highly educated job candidates, is unlikely to change.

Ultimately, Facebook’s Social Jobs Partnership is a game changer within the staffing industry that provides agencies and competing platforms with a tremendous opportunity to move their world ahead – or see their world start to end – depending on how they adapt. For staffing agencies, success, more than ever before, will be contingent on how one of the biggest social networks ever created is blended into a holistic and optimized recruitment strategy.

For more information on the battle between LinkedIn and Facebook I encourage you to read a white paper my company developed several weeks before the launch of the Facebook Social Jobs Partnership, LinkedIn Updates vs. Facebook’s Jobs Board: What You Need to Know.