Facebook muscles in on LinkedIn territory with jobs feature

Facebook Inc said on Monday it was testing a feature that would let page administrators create job postings and receive applications from candidates, a move that could pressure LinkedIn Corp's recruiting business.

"Based on behaviour we've seen on Facebook, where many small businesses post about their job openings on their Page, we're running a test for page admins to create job postings and receive applications from candidates," a company spokesman told Reuters.

LinkedIn makes most of its revenue from job hunters and recruiters who pay a monthly fee to post resumes and connect with people on what's often known as the social network for business.

Technology news website TechCrunch first reported the news on Monday.

With Facebook's jobs features, companies could drive more traffic to their Facebook pages while allowing them to pay the social network to get their job openings in front of more candidates, TechCrunch said.

The new features could compete with LinkedIn, as well as developers like Work4, Workable and Jobscore that build ''Jobs'' tab applications that businesses can embed in their Facebook Pages. Perhaps Facebook was prepping for these new features when it tested Profile Tags last year that mimic LinkedIn's endorsements feature.

A new Facebook option in the status update composer allows Pages to formally share a job opening with related details like job title, salary or if it's full-time versus part-time. The special formatting could differentiate job postings from other content and attract eyeballs amongst the crowded News Feed.

These job postings will also show up in a Jobs tab of the Page, creating a dedicated landing place where companies can send job seekers. Businesses would get the added benefit of potentially gaining new followers whether or not someone inquires about the open position, compared to a relatively static Careers page on a company's website.

Job postings will include an ''Apply Now'' button that launches a standard job application flow, but pre-populated with information from a user's public profile. That could help people quickly apply for multiple jobs without typing in redundant information.

Submitted applications will be received by the Page as a Facebook Message. Though this could bolster Facebook's push to get businesses using its chat feature, it also might be clumsy for companies to mix job applications in with the customer support requests they typically get via Facebook messages. The potential option to forward job applications to the email address of the company's recruiter might work better.

Businesses will also be able to pay to show their News Feed job postings to more people, directly competing with some of LinkedIn's ad offerings. Facebook's opportunity here combines its ubiquitous reach, personal data and engagement.

In October, Facebook launched Marketplace to allow people to buy and sell items locally as the social media network tries new ways to keep its users engaged.