Facebook’s Long-Awaited Job Board is Finally Ready to Launch

UPDATE: Facebook’s job board launched on Wednesday morning (Nov. 14.)

Facebook’s much postponed job board is now scheduled for launch — perhaps in the next week or so.

Part of the Social Jobs Partnership with the U.S. Department of Labor and several non-profit career services, the new effort will be Facebook’s first searchable jobs database, and will launch with more than 1 million listings.

The job board project was first reported in early July, and was originally to have launched in August. It was delayed then, and then again in mid-September. The reasons for the postponements were not disclosed. A source told me that Facebook has now given the go-ahead to launch the site, though, “we’ve seen this happen before (last minute postponements).”

Facebook site will reportedly aggregate job listings

Specific details for the launch site weren’t available. However, according to details first reported by The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires in July, the jobs site will aggregate listings from BranchOut, DirectEmployers Association, Jobvite, Monster, and Work4Labs. Both BranchOut, and Monster’s BeKnown, are social networking subgroups built on the Facebook platform, specifically for business and recruiting.

The Social Jobs Partnership was announced a year ago and launched on Facebook. It was a collaborative effort by Facebook, the Labor Department, the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), DirectEmployers Association, and the National Association of State Workforce Agencies (NASWA) providing links to resources and other content for job seekers.

The missing ingredient was a job board. Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg long expected that recruitment would be a part of the Facebook platform. Until now, however, jobs weren’t searchable; employers bought job ads which are served to targeted site visitors based on behavioral and profile data.

The Social Jobs Partnership job board isn’t a commercial project, at least not for Facebook. Jobs listings from the participants will be offered at no additional charge. However, what Facebook learns from the project could easily be used to build a jobs delivery service of its own.

John Zappe is the editor of The Fordyce Letter. He was a newspaper reporter and editor until his geek gene lead him to launch his first website in 1994. Never a recruiter, he instead built online employment sites and sold advertising services to recruiters and employers. Besides writing for ERE.net, John consults with digital content operations, focusing on the advertising side. Contact him at zappemedia@gmail.com.

Jason Webster

“Aggregating job listings” will not make a job board on Facebook unique. Showing connections to job is interesting, but it’s now common across job-related sites (see Glassdoor). Where Facebook can truly capitalize is on the multitude of content being uploaded every day by people working at the companies and on the hiring teams. Figuring out how to serve up dynamic content surrounding a job to interested recipients is a recipe to make this a game changer…not just another destination for “aggregated job listings”.
http://twitter.com/Sarangbrahme Sarang Brahme

This will surely shot up prices of third party job posting ads on Facebook as everyone will jump on them :)
http://delhi.niyukti.in/ delhi.niyukti.in

The sheer size of the Facebook footprint makes it a formidable platform for a job board. Apart from sites mentioned there are scores of FB Pages that list jobs and can easily be integrated in Facebook’s job listing. This could have far reaching impact in future.
http://twitter.com/VocusCareers Vocus Careers

This is a tremendous opportunity for employers whose target demographic has a large presence on Facebook. Recruiters, who are in the know, are using social platforms to source and recruit candidates. If this works, it will give a great incentive to those employers who don’t currently have a Facebook presence to establish one. At Vocus, we integrated our Jobvite listings on our careers page so fans can apply for jobs without leaving the platform. Hopefully, these opportunities will now be searchable to Facebook users. If you’re looking for a job in the DC area at company with tremendous growth, check us out facebook.com/vocuscareers.