Facebook Job Board a True Threat?

In a move that has some experts foretelling the downfall of LinkedIn and other job boards, a mega-partnership between Facebook and five other organizations has resulted in the release of Facebook’s new jobs app. But the performance of the new service is being questioned by users who are noting a series of obstacles that must be overcome before it can pose a real threat to LinkedIn’s dominance. This has led to wide disbelief in many news stories that treat the event as a rousing success.

Some of the examples where the job app has underwhelmed include:

• Boasting 1.7 million posted jobs while delivering very few results for general searches.

• Search tabs that force users to jump between results instead of offering an integrated solution.

• Underperforming search relevance system delivers jobs not related to search terms. Search tabs also sometimes return zero results for a search where a visit directly to the specified job board finds many job listings.

• Additional apps are required to view jobs from the board forcing users to leave the Facebook app to access the job listing.

• Inability to network or view connections within job postings without the installation of additional apps.

Furthermore, every job listed in the app so far has already been posted somewhere else and was already searchable by job seekers. The impressive statistic of 1.7 million job postings did not arise from recruiters swarming the site to list jobs, but from simply re-listing jobs from other job aggregators and job distribution technology companies. Other user reported issues include database errors, broken application links, and malfunctioning search functionality.