The lack of skilled IT workers is hurting the deployment of emerging technology, according to a new survey from Gartner. In areas from cloud to cybersecurity, this crisis is expected to last for years to come.
For the first
time, Facebook has rolled out an option for Page Admins within the status update composer to post job
descriptions as a separate content class, similar to Events, Photos or Places.
This new update option allows employers to augment these posts with position
specific details such as compensation range, specific location, and job
classification (e.g. full or part time, temporary or permanent).
By creating
job postings as a differentiated content category, Facebook seems to be sending
the signal that these postings would stand out from other status updates
cluttering most users’ News Feeds, with special formatting designed to
delineate job postings from other company content (similar to how Life Events
display differently on your personal timeline).
Why Recruiters Should Care
About Job Postings On Facebook.
The job postings, will be displayed through a default “Jobs” tab that will ostensibly become a core component of a company’s Pages presence; this jobs tab will link to a dedicated landing page where companies can drive job seekers.
Admins will
receive real time updates whenever a new follower or existing fan engages with
the job description as part of the broader moderation workflow, a critical
capability missing from existing employer focused Facebook recruiting efforts,
which are often limited to separate, dedicated destinations clearly
differentiated from a company’s consumer focused presence on Pages.
Additionally,
current Facebook Careers pages largely require redirects to company career
sites or external job postings; the new Facebook job postings will purportedly
include an “Apply Now” button that works on both mobile and desktop instances
of Facebook.
Using Facebook
Connect to prepopulate application forms with user information (similar to the
“Apply With LinkedIn” functionality) directly from Facebook itself. This,
TechCrunch notes, “could help people quickly apply for multiple jobs without
typing in redundant information.”
In other
words, when it comes to candidate experience, it looks like Facebook’s
newest offering might finally fix that whole notion of the “black hole” – recruiters receive any completed application directly through
Facebook messenger, in an apparent attempt to increase utilization of this
functionality among B2B users and advertisers.
Coupled with
the increased rise in recruiting specific bots being developed for recruiters
through the Facebook Bot Exchange, such as Mya and RAI by HiringSolved, which work natively with
applicant tracking systems and messaging tools such as Facebook or Skype to ask
questions to screen applicants for qualifications and automatically update
candidates on their application status, Facebook looks positioned to quickly
become among the most efficient and effective sources of hire available to
employers.
While job
postings will be free (for the time being), Facebook is leveraging its rich
user data, unrivaled reach and highly sophisticated ad targeting capabilities
to offer employers the ability to use
Facebook Ads to increase the reach and impressions of specific job ads
through programmatic campaigns priced on a PPA/PPC basis, with job openings
appearing to targeted passive candidates’ News Feeds based on their online
behaviors, user profiles and demographic data.
You The Boss:
Why Facebook for Recruiting Should Be A Sourcing Silver Bullet.
Of course, targeting
job ads using Facebook’s native ad exchange has recently come under fire; just
last week, with a lawsuit filed in the US District
Court for the Northern District of California (long a hot spot for potentially
precedent setting tech test cases) charging that Facebook violated federal
employment laws prohibiting job related discrimination by allowing companies to
exclude specific audience segments (such as African and Asian Americans) from
seeing selected advertisements.
The suit notes
that the “multicultural marketing” practices not only allow employers to
systematically exclude diverse job seekers from their recruitment related
advertising, but conversely, does not allow companies to exclude “ or
Caucasian Americans” from similar targeted campaigns, unique among ethnicities.
By creating a
separate job posting product as well as a different content (and likely, ad
type) from its core consumer offerings, Facebook seems to be anticipating
similar legal challenges while creating the compliance capabilities required
for additional investments or product offerings for recruiting and hiring.
Facebook has already publically confirmed that it’s experimenting “with a slew of recruiting features,”
which should come as no surprise, given the billions of dollars a year employers spend on online recruitment marketing and advertising – only a small
fraction of which, it seems, is being spent on Facebook.
For a company
whose growth is predicated on ad revenue, the move into owning more of this
lucrative (and growing) market should come as no surprise. After all, as
Facebook adroitly admitted, it’s already got a bunch of market research and
historical data to inform its recruiting related initiatives.
As a Facebook
spokesperson noted, the company is merely standardizing and optimizing an
established, entrenched process of posting job openings on Facebook – as more than 4 in 5 companies currently do without a formal product offering as part of their
social recruiting strategies – explaining:
“Based on
behavior we’ve seen on Facebook, where many small businesses post about their
job openings on their Page, we’re running a test for Page admins to create job
postings and receive applications from their candidates.”
This should
not only scare traditional job boards and developers like Work4 or
Jobscore, whose products are predicated on offering these sorts of
native recruiting capabilities directly within the Facebook environment, but,
most obviously, LinkedIn. And here’s where it gets interesting.
The Devil Is A
Lie: Facebook, LinkedIn and the Future of Recruiting
With Microsoft reportedly announcing it would complete its
close on the LinkedIn deal by the end of Q4, the company has made a $26 billion
dollar bet on the professional networking market traditionally dominated by
this “social network.”
With the
recent release of the new Microsoft Teams, a collaboration platform similar to Slack, as part of the core
Office environment, as well as the integration of Skype for Business and
redesign of Sharepoint, it appears as if Microsoft has the workplace squarely
in its sights – and LinkedIn’s user data is a key component of that strategy
(not to mention its monetization plan for Bing, targeting capabilities for
Dynamics CRM Online and core selling points of the new Enterprise Mobility
Suite).
It should also
be noted Microsoft for Business has also started touting its ability to “keep
your employees securely connected to business critical apps wherever they are,” specifically signing a “global strategic
partnership” with Workday this past September to “connect HR data to the data
underlying Microsoft Office,” a philosophy that ostensibly extends to the
future roadmap of LinkedIn.
The battle
lines are shaping up, and they extend as far as bot development, where Facebook
and Microsoft, respectively, are the two dominant development platforms for
these emerging technologies.
Of course, Workplace by Facebook (aka Facebook at
Work), launched just a few weeks ago, challenges many of the collaboration
and productivity capabilities Microsoft touts as a primary selling point of its
platform – essentially offering a product that competes head to head with Yammer
(Facebook Groups), Sharepoint (Pages) and Skype (Messenger). This already made
them a player to watch in HR Technology – but their sudden move into the
workplace seems to solidify the fact that Facebook is playing to win when it
comes to HR Technology.
And all I can
say is, game on.
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