Facebook Application for Job Seekers
Nowadays, social nets become more diversified in terms of their content. Complying with this notion, Facebook has launched an application that is sure to be of interest to many citizens who are in search for jobs. The application is intended for United States and is called Social Jobs App. It is a result of a year-old partnership between Facebook and the U.S. Department of Labor, the National Association of Colleges and Employers, the National Association of State Workforce Agencies and DirectEmployers Association.
The Look
The application has a simple interface: a counter and several windows for inserting keywords or selecting job categories. The first thing that catches your eye in the application is the total number of available jobs. Underneath you'll find the windows for selecting the working sphere, from categories to subcategories. There's also a noteworthy feature: a Veteran-Friendly option, which allows you to search for occupations that can be taken by veterans.
The Application Page
The application launches with employment opportunities provided by BranchOut, Work4Labs, Jobvite, DirectEmployers Association, and Monster.com. The number of vacancies provided is over 1.7 million. The links to the mentioned five providers fill the major part of the page and you can visit them from here if you wish.
How it Works
The most intriguing thing about the app is the way it works. Let's go step by step through the whole process.
First we enter the desired occupation, say an engineer, and specify our location: San Francisco. If we want to, the category and subcategory may be filtered too, making for a more precise search. We can also specify the neighborhood we are ready to work in, in case there are no vacancies in San Francisco itself. The neighborhood varies from 5 to 100 miles; I've tried several distances, namely 5 and 60 mi and the results were different (you can see this in the screenshots). Then we could tick the box Veteran-Friendly. (I couldn't figure out if this filter really works, as the number of the occupations found didn't change for one city, while the list was reorganized, and provided totally different results for another.)
Veteran-Friendly Off and On
When all the required boxes are ticked and filled out you can move on and click Search Jobs. The results are shown below the form under five tabs (for five linked job searching services). If you tap on a vacancy in the list, a short description appears and a link to its original post. At the same moment you see the location of the job and the company offering it.
Vacancy Description
Sadly, you cannot apply for the job right from the Social Jobs Application page. Thus its main function seems to ease the process of search, and it's still to be polished. Another minor drawback that I found is the absence of a company-based filter. Thus even if I know which company I want to try to join as a worker, I won't be able to sort out its offers.
Bottom Line
Social Jobs App is created around a very good idea, as social networks are very popular now and employers have a higher chance to find workers there not to mention that employees are offered a more handy search engine compared to jumping from site to site. Still there is a lot of work to do.
