@ Everybody:
It’s not important if there is/isn’t a FB job board or if it does/doesn’t make money. What’s important is the PERCEPTION/HOPE that there is (and that it does), so that the slick hucksters with high-level connections ready to sell the recruiting snake oil or “magic bullet”( to desperate and not-yet insolvent recruiters and their superiors who fail to recognize that in most cases they are futilely “rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic” of their companies’ ill-conceived, over-blown, grossly-dysfunctional hiring practices) can continue to make money putting on webinars and conferences telling you how to get it to work.

Cheers,

Keith
keithsrj@sbcglobal.net

Sorry, I must stop typing so fast.

What I meant to say was:

“I sense from your comment that you believe it will help people to get back to work. Sadly, I think many people are never going back to work. Never, ever going to happen as the world has shifted. I will not go political on this board as that is not my style but I will make one statement.”

Perhaps a bit of miscommunication here as I never stated that you believe it would harm the staffing industry.

See the cut and paste below in quotes from your response to me above?

“Justin Miller Jul 27, 2012 at 12:24 pm

Do we need one? I don’t see the harm. There are jobs out there, and there are DEFINITELY people who need them, what’s the harm in providing a venue for those jobs that may garner more visibility?”

My only thought was that a “whats the harm” type of thinking is glib but it is hardly a solid strategy or biz case for a FB job board.

I sense from your comment that you believe it will help people to get back to work. Sadly, I think not as many people are never going back to work. Never, ever going to happen as the world has shifted. I will not go political on this board as that is not my style but I will make one statement.

We need many things to happen if we are to get people back to work. A FB job board is last on the list. It will create buzz, make a few hires and circulate endless jobs that people will see in endless other places and not even remember if they applied in the first place. You see opportunity. I see more madness and more confusion.

I do not believe that a FB board will even scratch the surface of the surface of solving the chronic employment issues this country now faces. Believe me Justin, I would rather be wrong then right here but I just have to call them based upon my beliefs.

If you go back and read the article you’ll notice I didn’t fail to make that point. “You may have noticed that in the past few months the Facebook camp have made numerous announcements regarding new programs it is rolling out. This includes an external ad network, and mobile advertisements. These broadcasts are undoubtedly in connection to Facebook’s May IPO launch that some deemed “underwhelming,” and an attempt to appease shareholders while boosting the company’s potential value.” In fact if anything, it helps make MY point that something needs to be done by FB to appease shareholders and raise revenue…what could that be? A job board perhaps?

Your second comment, I’m not even sure what you’re trying to say. So you’re saying a job board on FB might appeal to low requirement workers? let me ask you, what do you think the discrepancy between low requirement and high requirement workers are in the US right now? I would argue it’s pretty weighted to the side of low requirement workers so wouldn’t that mean a FB Job board would be a good call? Plus no where does this article say a FB job board would harm if not help recruiters?

Howard – I appreciate the response but I think you’re being a little dramatic when you get into issues of society when we’re just talking about a theoretical job board on a site that has a dedicated user-base already. Keep in mind we aren’t talking about recruiting on Facebook, but simply posting jobs to a dedicated page that probably wouldn’t require any type of socialization aside from maybe a share button. To answer your question, simply put it’s both. Americans need jobs, FB already entered an agreement with the Government to help facilitate getting people back to work, this would help, and yes FB needs to generate revenue, this is capitalism, I would be more upset if they WEREN’T trying to build new services and generating revenue. Also, again, never ONCE said it would harm the staffing industry, in fact I’ve said it could do nothing but help it.

Your comment interests me on many levels. Off FB for a year is impressive. I remain on for a few friends and others I do not often see but something is terribly wrong with either FB, how it is used or some combo of the two.

Speaking honestly, I can’t seem to get my head around it but on many levels, FB seems to be a way to get a lot of insane people who are angry about everything from religion to politics to just about everything else to hammer you every single day.

Don’t get me wrong. Much of it is good and perhaps the answer is to carefully control who you let in but I am inches away from saying goodbye to FB and keeping my real friends.

Do we need a FB job board? I asked Justin Miller and he told me that it could not hurt. While this answer might be correct on the surface, I suspect in a society that is falling to pieces in a host of different places, can’t hurt is not enough reason. The question to me is not if we need a FB job board but if FB needs us to rake in money after the catastrophic IPO.

Will recruiting really suffer if there is not FB job board. I think not.

I shouldn’t have lumped CB in with Monster when I said “rapid decline in profits” that truly was a misstep mainly because there’s no way of knowing seeing as how they do not release their quarterly earnings and are now privately owned by Gannett Co., Inc. (NYSE: GCI), Tribune Company, The McClatchy Company (NYSE: MNI) and Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT). Obviously Monster’s financials are available and they aren’t pretty so I shouldn’t have lumped the two in together when talking finance.

However, when it comes to usage, again Monster is self evident but if you look at YOY job postings for CB, although they are still in the green you can see a decline. For example: since December they went from the high teens or low 20% per month to now averaging around 6% new job posts per month which to me is a sign of 2 things: more of a focus elsewhere, and fewer new jobs being created. Maybe I’m wrong, but when doing research for my own companies on where to invest ad-spend, we typically have been less and less interested in the old school job boards and more interested in social and more niche boards. That’s just my opinion, and this was an opinion piece.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Facebook but I don’t believe that Facebook and the job market go hand in hand… (at least for now) All job applications launched on Facebook proves it. None picked up.

Also the fact that any job aggregator will have way more valuable content than the facebook job board (which will come from partners content) makes me wonder, why would I use facebook to look for jobs instead of an aggregator which has way more content?

There is something more, on linkedin, everyone writes what they do but on Facebook despite them trying to force you to write what you were doing, still most of users don’t say what they do and this is for a reason… many people don’t want to mix facebook with their work life. Having said that it will be hard for facebook to match people…

It will be interesting to see the model their adopt, I don’t believe it will be possible to apply with Facebook in a closed environment as big companies don’t want to spend time posting jobs and sourcing for candidates in a new platform. Morever, a “facebook apply button” will take a lot of time and b2b sales effort to be implemented.

I’d be very interested in seeing the data that led you to these very bold claims. I think you have carelessly jumped on the bandwagon of erroneously associating the entire ‘job board’ industry with what is happening at Monster.

Monster is is definitely in a downward spiral. However, Monster’s woes are attributed to poor executive leadership and lack of innovation (pretty important for a technology company), not a shift in how people search for employment opportunities.

Careerbuilder has been experiencing double digit growth the past few years(even in the current economy) and job postings use is up YOY. Also look at the ascent of aggregators like Indeed and SimplyHired.

As for Facebook, I’m definitely interested to see how this venture works for them. You seem attribute immediate probability of success simply due to the shear number of users that they have globally, which I think is a mistake. If you understand the job board industry, it’s not about simply throwing out opportunities to a mass of people. It is about TECHNOLOGY, matching individuals seeking opportunity with organizations seeking talent. You don’t simply just throw X and Y into bottle, shake it, then hope it works. There is more technology and data involved than you could possibly imagine. In light of Facebook’s IPO performance and the details that have emerged, I wouldn’t be so confident that they could pull off this endeavor. There is very deep doubt of performance and profitability with their most core offering: marketing.

I am suggesting that a hypothetical Facebook job board just might offer a more streamlined approach. That’s what Facebook does, they find what people want and make it extremely easy to get as much data as they can.

I feel like this is getting a bit silly now, I’m going to retire for the weekend.

I don’t work for Indeed.

Your sentence is just misleading. Monster also links to ATS pages in addition to hosting its own apply pages that do have multiple steps.

–

Are you suggesting Facebook would offer employers an alternative – where the job seeker does not apply at the ATS, but rather has their Facebook profile submitted instead?

See a job you like on Indeed?

Click on it> It takes you to the company who posted it’s application page> You then have to (usually) create an account>Upload resume>cover letter.

Do you work for Indeed?

Example of this on Indeed please?

I’m wrapping up for the day so I apologize but I’m just going to fire off my answers to your questions:

- No, LinkedIn pretty much is the reason Monster is declining, they are just a better more robust model. It’s what people want now. Monster’s marketing is probably one of their strong suits.

- Simple, Monster’s model allows it to have a more robust cache of services to charge for. Resume viewing licenses, job postings, display ad network, spotlight job postings, enterprise services, semantic search capabilities, etc. Indeed is a job aggregator, they own only a small fraction of the jobs actually posted, this allows them to only really charge for featured jobs. Again, can’t stress this enough, not bashing Indeed.

-Just like Facebook does with every new project they roll out, they partner with a large brand name company. Monster in all their flaws still has name recognition and is considered the go-to brand when it comes to job boards. Just like Facebook partnered with Wal-Mart for video streaming, and Rovio for games, they will want a big name to attach this initiative to, if they want to partner at all, which they might not.

-Not sure where you’re getting “misinformation” from. Despite having different models, Indeed and Monster are both job boards. They house different jobs from different specialties from different companies. Nothing about that makes that wrong or misleading. They both have application processes and they both require multiple steps.

That’s about all I have for today, thanks for everyone who read and shared my article, and thanks to all that commented. Have a great weekend

Follow me on Twitter: @TweetsByJmiller

“Monster, despite being on the decline, still pours millions of dollars into advertising, partnerships, and marketing.”

Maybe this is the reason for continued decline?

“I don’t have any figures in front of me, but I would bet that Monster spends more on marketing than Indeed does, merely because Monster is it’s own enclosed entity while Indeed is more of a job aggregate.”

What does the model have to do with marketing spend?

“I’m not saying Indeed would be a bad partner, in fact it makes total and complete sense, what I AM saying is, it’s more likely Facebook would partner with Monster.”

Simply because Monster has a bigger PR budget? Facebook has more free PR than anyone. They don’t need help from Monster’s dinky budget. If they really considered Monster, they would probably just buy it, keep the sales people, and trash the site.

“Hate the long application process for Monster or Indeed?” By putting Monster and Indeed in the same sentence this way without any other context, you imply they are the same thing and that there’s a long application process on Indeed, which is misinformation.

I’m also not sure what misinformation you’re referring to, but again Indeed is an aggregator so when you click an ad it often times takes you to an external page where you have to fill out a job application etc. I would imagine a Facebook application never requires you to leave the site (again keep in mind Zuckerberg is always finding ways to make Facebook your only internet necessity) and simply beams the data to the job manager’s portal much like with their display ad dashboard.