Why Facebook Job Apps Will Ultimately Fail

Amit De is the CEO and co-founder of Careerleaf, a platform that helps job seekers showcase their skills and talents, search for jobs, and track and organize communications all from one place. Connect with Amit and CareerLeaf on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
While many Facebook job apps are trying to give LinkedIn a run for its money, none of the job search and recruitment apps available today are true competition for everyone’s main professional network, LinkedIn. Apps like Glassdoor, BranchOut, and BeKnown attempt to leverage the social platform as a way to make professional connections — but since Facebook’s social platform was built for personal interactions, most job seekers don’t want to leverage it as part of their job hunt.
Although a recent job seeker survey shows that Facebook is the favored platform for job hunting, the apps just aren’t up to par with competing websites. The following is why these types of Facebook apps will not succeed as a main tool for professional networking, recruitment, and job searching.
SEE ALSO: Why You Should Keep Facebook and Your Job Search Separate First, Facebook apps offer less privacy. Glassdoor users historically enjoyed anonymity in posting their salaries and experiences with companies. The Glassdoor Facebook app, which is populated by 4.2 million monthly active users (and only about 150,000 using the app daily), takes this anonymity away by showing you which friends are on Glassdoor. Forbes writer Kashmir Hill provides an example of why this is a problem:

“A colleague of mine was recently doing a little salary sleuthing on the site and noted that in the ‘anonymous salary information’ on Glassdoor, one VP had volunteered that he or she made $167K. ‘I’m Facebook friends with exactly one vice president, my colleague writes. ‘Does he make $167,000? It seems that with a little sleuthing you could find out exactly what your coworkers — at least the ones you’re Facebook friends with — make.’”

Privacy vs. Sharing

Next, on Facebook there’s inability to separate personal and professional contacts. With BranchOut, many users feel it is simply not professional enough for their job search — often citing vague permissions screens and the high possibility of spamming their friends as reason enough not to use the app. In fact, in a review of the application, Laurence Hebberd of Link Human writes that users are only given the option to “add a group of friends from a particular school, university or workplace. You cannot choose particular friends to invite, or remove them from the app invitation.”
Many Facebook users want to be careful about who they include in their professional network — and the “option for apps such as this really needs to be selective down to each Facebook friend, not a whole group invite,” Hebberd writes. However, BeKnown’s upside — the ability for users to list specific friends, only if they agree to be included — is a step in the right direction, despite only reaching about 250,000 users each month.
Additionally, most Facebook users still don’t desire to merge their personal and professional lives, as evident by the “relatively minuscule use of the Facebook apps that venture into professional profiles or networking,” writes Randall Stross in The New York Times. BranchOut currently has 4.2 million monthly active users, while its daily user count has been on a steady decline — compared to LinkedIn’s 150 million registered users.
Ultimately, job seekers, while they may check out Facebook job apps, will return to tried-and-true sites like LinkedIn for their job search.

Alternatives to Facebook Job Apps

Users who like the more intimate feel of Facebook apps but dislike the platform should look for niche sites, designed for a more focused job search and networking experience. Niche communities and job boards — such as Dribbble, deviantART, Github and StackOverflow — still allow candidates to connect and network, but also offer a professional platform by which to apply for jobs.
While these types of sites don’t have as nearly as many users or the amount of traffic that Facebook boasts (Dribbble reportedly has upwards of 94,000 daily views), users have a higher success rate of being found and hired via niche networks than on Facebook (only one to three percent of hires from major recruiters are attributed to Facebook).
Do you use Facebook job apps? What has been your experience with them?

Social Media Job Listings

Every week we post a list of social media and web job opportunities. While we publish a huge range of job listings, we’ve selected some of the top social media job opportunities from the past two weeks to get you started. Happy hunting!

• Brand Manager, Digital Games at Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. in Burbank
• Director of Customer Acquisition at SeatGeek in New York
• Web Product Manager II at Bentley University in Waltham, Mass.

Image courtesy of Flickr, Darwin Bell