Could Facebook Eat Up LinkedIn with its New Jobs Feature?

It looks like Facebook is going to be giving LinkedIn a very tight competition very soon. The social media platform just announced that it is expanding its job listing feature to more than 40 countries. This means that businesses would be able to post jobs and hire people directly on Facebook,

However, job posting is not a new feature on Facebook. In fact, it was first tested in 2016 and made public in 2017. But that roll-out was limited to just two countries: Canada and the US. Recently though, in its bid to make the platform more meaningful to people, the company has expanded its jobs feature to countries such as Spain, France and Brazil.

Helping People Find Jobs and Local Businesses Hire https://t.co/AY03dcpGfy

— Facebook Newsroom (@fbnewsroom) February 28, 2018

This move somewhat portends that Facebook would take on LinkedIn, the decision was actually data-driven. Alex Himel, a Facebook executive, shared that the company did a survey and discovered that one in four Americans searched or found a job through Facebook. But it also discovered that 40% of people found the process rather difficult.

Thu,s it had to find a way to make the process simpler. And that decision led to the expansion of the jobs feature. Holistically, with the jobs feature, businesses can create job posts, manage applications and schedule interviews right from Facebook. Individuals can also set job alerts for offers that would be of interest to them.

Would Facebook Now be a Threat to LinkedIn?

According to many industry watchers, this move signals a threat to Microsoft’s LinkedIn. For years now, LinkedIn has been a steady and incomparable platform for business networking.

Businesses and individuals have found the platform quiet important for recruiting highly skilled individuals. With its pool of data scientists, LinkedIn offers more bang for the buck for job recruiters. And it has been quite profitable too. In Q4 2017, it posted revenue of $1.1 billion.

But with the Jobs feature, Facebook looks like it could to disrupt LinkedIn. Even though LinkedIn is hugely popular for skilled labour, its user numbers are nowhere close to Facebook’s over 2 billion users.

Importantly too, the platform is looking to target small businesses and provide them with low-skilled workers within their locale. That could be one big distinguishing factor, and could make the platform appealing for the over 70 million businesses registered there.

Therefore, it is important to remember that Facebook staked its finances to ensure the platform promotes meaningful social interaction. So it has cut down the number of ads it displays and has significantly altered its algorithm for this purpose. The effect of these moves is definitely lower revenue from ads.

Industry watchers have been looking out for what the social media platform could use to shore up its revenue in the meantime. And it appears providing enterprise services, such as job posting, could be important to the company as a new revenue stream. This would fit in well with its other enterprise service, Facebook Workplace.

Workplace is a chat and collaboration tool for businesses. Though it bears striking similarities with Slack,  it is used by over 30,000 organisations and is not all free.

If Facebook takes both services seriously, they definitely could form a serious revenue stream in the long run. So LinkedIn watch out, Facebook has it out for you!