Facebook gives us a half-baked job board turkey…and it’s not even Thanksgiving yet

Facebook launched its long-rumored job board turkey, umm, offering last week. It was a bit rocky:

• ” It’s buggy and kind of janky looking.” – FB user Mike Chapman (and thank you, Mike, for introducing me to a new, useful word!)
• “The entire platform is stalled before it even got started. In many ways, it doesn’t function properly at all. There is bad targeting either for the job itself or for the location parameters (or, in some tragic cases, both). When it works, the results are underwhelming.” – Lance Haun, SourceCon (go ahead, Lance, tell us what you really think!)
• “(W)hat Facebook did here is like improving the old-school Walkman when there are iPods available.” – Piotr Kopak, ERE.net

Ouch.

So what exactly is wrong with the Facebook job board?

1. It’s not actually a job board. It’s an aggregator, theoretically taking job content and other things from BranchOut, Monster, Us.Jobs (i.e., Direct Employers), Jobvite, and Work4Labs. To its credit, Facebook doesn’t actually call its offering a ‘job board’ – they call it a ‘social jobs partnership‘.
2. It doesn’t work very well. As Lance detailed in his review – and which I verified myself – the app doesn’t deliver decent results. If I carefully select my source (Monster) and if I am content to get a small subset of the jobs available, then the app sorta-kinda works.
3. It’s not social. Hey, if you’re going to call your app a ‘social jobs partnership’, how about at least a vague tip of the hat toward being social? Does being social really just boil down to a ‘like’ or ‘share’ button? Is that it?
4. Where’s the value? If you have a job board or a jobs app or even a ‘Wanted’ sign in the window, you should be offering some basic value – something like ‘You can find a job here’. Facebook’s ‘social jobs partnership’ is offering less value than any of its partners’ own products/sites, while promising more.

I don’t know what Forbes was smoking when they claimed Facebook was changing the face of recruiting – maybe it was a slow news day and they needed a catchy headline? If you follow Twitter and the general news, you know that many job seekers and uninformed members of the general public swallowed the claim hook, line, and sinker – and that’s really too bad. There are plenty of innovative job boards, community sites, social search services, and more that run rings around the Facebook offering.

The online recruiting industry and press needs to push back. Tell folks that the Facebook job app is a job board turkey. Show them better alternatives.

And, umm, LinkedIn? I don’t think you have anything to worry about. Yet.

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