Facebook is actively developing a service for finding work and hiring employees in a social network.

It is not a secret for anyone that Facebook’s largest social network in the world has long been not used in its original and intended purpose - to communicate with relatives, friends and acquaintances. Modern Facebook is a huge “Internet on the Internet”, through which goods and services are sold, advertising campaigns are held, news is distributed and, not least, employees are looking for or new jobs.

A few days ago, the social network management took another step towards adapting Facebook to looking for work (pretending thereby to the LinkedIn market): the company hired top managers and the entire Refdash service team, which had officially become part of the Facebook Jobs team . Refdash initially focused on finding and hiring technical specialists, but Facebook managed to seduce the project team to go under the auspices of the social network and work on Facebook Jobs:

We decided to take advantage of the new opportunity and become part of a larger, fast-growing team, where we can have a much greater impact and continue our work.

At the same time, the Refdash service was promptly closed:
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Facebook started working on its Jobs service at the end of 2016, and in 2017 the service was first made available to the general public from the USA and Canada. Initially, Facebook Jobs was positioned as an opportunity to post vacancies for small and medium businesses that are looking for low-skilled or non-technology-related labor. The social network itself positioned Jobs as an excellent opportunity to find “working hands” in the truest sense of the word. For example, by searching 64 km from Moscow, you can see that companies are looking for florists, waiters, bakers, consultants and even sales managers.

The main area of ​​application of Facebook Jobs features is the search for employees for the service industry, catering, maintenance workers and so on. At the same time, a publication with a vacancy, like any other posts, is picked up by social network algorithms and displayed in users' tapes. And like regular posts, jobs can be promoted with the help of tagging and other tools for advertising records.

Surprisingly, the placement of such vacancies on Facebook bore fruit, which was clearly noticeable with the expansion of the Facebook Jobs geography to 40 countries in 2017-2018. The social network actively reported on the “instantaneous closing of vacancies” in many areas and received a lot of positive feedback. Thus, Facebook has withdrawn social network hiring from the state of “ads in the tape of popular accounts” to something more structured.

The takeover of the Refdash project team is an important call that the social network has been saturated with hiring low-skilled labor and is switching to more serious market segments, primarily hiring for IT. The main goal of the newly acquired team is to extrapolate the Refdash experience gained over two years to the realities of Facebook Jobs in terms of hiring highly qualified personnel, improving the interface, increasing Jobs transparency and usability for both companies and applicants.



The timeline for starting work on Facebook Jobs directly coincides with another significant event in the hiring market in 2016 - with the purchase of LinkedIn by Microsoft for $ 26 billion. Then, potential buyers of LinkedIn were also Google and Facebook. Google’s motives were obvious - the company is successful in everything except building communities and social networks, so LinkedIn could be “another attempt.” Facebook could buy LinkedIn in order to “strangle” or partially absorb a competitor, but Microsoft won the bidding. Almost simultaneously with this event, the first mentions of Facebook Jobs emerge, which, apparently, was left without LinkedIn's “hot base”. Hence, the modest development of "bottom-up", and a minimum of hype around a young service.

In fact, hiring the Refdash team and announcing the entry of highly qualified personnel to the market means taking a course on direct competition with LinkedIn, the main professional social network.