It’s not Craigslist Facebook is going after. It’s LinkedIn.
After denying earlier this month that it was building a classified ad product called “Marketplace,” the social network announced the launch of “Social Jobs App” on Wednesday, a move that effectively signifies the company throwing its hat into the job board ring.
The application is the culmination of a year-long partnership between Facebook, the United States Department of Labor, the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), DirectEmployers Association, and the National Association of State Workforce Agencies (NASWA). Known as the Social Job Partnership, the various organizations aim to leverage social media into making it easier for people to find employment.
“When it comes to economic growth, few issues are more important than matching qualified candidates with great jobs,” the company said in a blog post. “In that spirit, we know that the power of social media— the connections between friends, family, and community— can have an outsized impact on finding jobs.”
The app boasts a total of 1,723,331 jobs currently available, aggregated from job recruitment sites like Monster.com, Jobvite, Work4Labs, DirectEmployers Association, and BranchOut.
If the company hopes to go after LinkedIn’s market share, though, it has some more work to do. The response by Facebook users has been fairly negative so far. Despite giving users the option to search for jobs by category and geographic locations, the app search results are a mixed grab bag of openings that don’t fit the criteria selected.
“That new Social Jobs Partnership search engine sucks. Really sucks,” complained Ken Edwards. “Searching for jobs within 50 miles of Bowling Green [Oh.] lists openings in Great Britain. As in, across the pond. Nice Job Facebook!”
“Database had errors when searching,” noted Ruok Twoday, “very sloooowwww, they have lots of work to do!!!”
“[S]o all it does is pull listings from Monster and a few other lesser known sites?” asked Brian Albers. “In reading the hype about this for the past week or so I was hoping for something a bit more groundbreaking than that.”
A Facebook representative assured the Daily Dot that the company had resolved the functionality issues with the app, but both of the reported issues still affected our test searches at the time of this writing.
Photo via Tax Credits/Flickr