Facebook Launches Social Job Application.

 

Facebook launched a new Social Jobs application on Wednesday in partnership with the Department of Labor and several leading career websites, including Monster.com, BranchOut and Jobvite.

The job board is intended to “leverage social media to connect great jobs with great candidates,” Facebook said in a statement announcing the Social Jobs app. There are currently more than 1.7 million job listings featured in the Facebook app.

SEE ALSO: Facebook Adds a News Feed Option: ‘Pages Only’

The app itself is fairly straightforward to use. Job hunters can search for a job by keyword, industry and location, and sift through the results that are pulled from each of the partner career websites. There is also an option to pull up veteran-friendly job results.

Facebook released a Social Jobs hub a year ago, which provided educational content and tools for job hunters from the Department of Labor, the National Association of Colleges and Employers and other organizations that partnered with the social network on the initiative. Some speculated at the time that this would pave the way for Facebook to launch a proper job board.

There’s no doubt that Facebook could leverage these partnerships with job sites and its massive user base of more than one billion to create a powerful job listings service. The bigger question though is whether it poses a threat to LinkedIn as a recruiting engine, which is where LinkedIn makes most of its money. LinkedIn has spent years building up relationships with headhunters and providing them with premium tools to scout for talent on the social network. To compete on that front, Facebook would need to do more than just aggregate listings from other job sites.

Still, as Facebook points out in its announcement, one study has found that half of employers already use Facebook in the hiring process, so there’s certainly potential.

LinkedIn investors clearly think there’s cause for concern. The company’s stock dipped immediately after Facebook announced the news, and was down more than 2% on the day as of publication.