Facebook Creeping In on LinkedIn’s Territory?
According to comScore, one of the fastest growing online categories over the past year has been Job Search. This is not surprising news by any means.
comScore’s Andrew Lipsman says that Job Search is up 33% vs. a year ago, and it reached 23.1 million visitors in July. Lipsman also says there is one site that isn’t even in the Job Search category that has been standing out for the same reason – LinkedIn. According to comScore data, LinkedIn neared its all-time high in July, with about 8 million visitors, a 66% increase from the year before.
Everybody knows LinkedIn is heavily used as a business networking tool, and that people use it when they need a job. It is frequently used by businesses for recruiting.
LinkedIn may have to worry about Facebook cramping its style however. Jessica Shambora, writing for Fortune, says that recruiters are increasingly looking to Facebook to find job candidates. One reason for this is that Facebook offers a broader look at the candidate in many cases, than a LinkedIn profile does. Facebook usually caters to people in their more natural element. Shambora writes:
For one thing, Facebook seems to cast a wider net and provide recruiters with more references – and more outlets to spread the news about a job opening. Facebook users have an average of 120 friends. While LinkedIn won’t release this statistic for its members, recruiters say the average number of connections likely is smaller because of the site’s narrower scope.
The types of relationships and contacts found in a personal network versus a professional one are also assumed to be more authentic and less transactional, and therefore more desirable to marketers. And while Facebook members now span all ages and demographics, the average age of its users is 31, compared to 41-years-old for LinkedIn.
She says that professional and personal lines are blurring more, and that the fear is going away as people become more comfortable with sharing their lives online. That’s an interesting concept, given that social media is frequently still costing people their jobs, and likely preventing them from finding new ones in many cases.
Facebook certainly has its privacy settings, but it seems that it if recruiters are looking more to Facebook, as they have been LinkedIn, those looking for work may still want to reserve some judgment about what they post.
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