Facebook’s New Jobs Board will Offer Access to Young Recruits

By the end of summer Facebook expects to launch a job posting board to aggregate third party postings from across the network, creating a searchable database.

The question for your small to mid-sized accounting firm then becomes “Why should we bother with Facebook when we’re a serious business?”

It’s a valid question. If your small firm is only prepared to deal with one networking platform, LinkedIn is probably the way to go, by virtue of its professional focus. Facebook, however, has its own set of benefits to offer. If you’re going after a consumer market, Facebook is the clear winner simply because of its enormity. Nearly everyone uses the site with some degree of regularity.

More important for your firm than size may be Facebook’s ability to reach new recruits and recent college graduates. With a shrinking pool of qualified accounting graduates available for hire, it pays to be where they are. And without a doubt, the young are on Facebook. When it comes to attracting and hiring new graduates, it’s also critical to appear (and to really be) a firm that’s a great place to work. Again, Facebook has the advantage here. The social nature of the site makes it appropriate to share the fun and flexible aspects of working at your firm in a way that would be less suitable on the straight-laced professionally focused LinkedIn platform. Finally, recruiting from Facebook carries the subtle message that your firm is social media-friendly, which research shows to be a hugely important trait to young employees.

Facebook Jobs begins with the advantage of six times as many monthly users as LinkedIn, augmented by the massive database of user information. The wide reach of the network should encourage companies to try it out as a recruiting tool that competes with LinkedIn. It may not pose a direct threat to LinkedIn since the networks’ users don’t overlap to a great extent, but Facebook has already proven its utility as a recruiting and hiring tool with the success of job posting apps that ride on top of the network, such as BranchOut and Glassdoor’s Inside Connections.

Leveraging their networking ability with their own dedicated job search and recruitment application holds the promise of expanding the power of Facebook yet again. If you’re serious about recruiting young workers, you’d probably better keep an eye on this new development.