Facebook Partnering With US Department of Labor To Help Unemployed Find Jobs

You would think with so many unemployed and so few job openings that the market for filling jobs was pretty efficient. And you would be wrong.

Like so many other markets whose alleged effiency is the stuff of ideological legend, labor markets are subject to 'information asymmetries.'

This is a convoluted way of saying that people tend to be subject to their networks or expectations so may not have the information they need to help themselves. This has manifested itself most obviously in the capital markets where perfectly legal knowledge of specific situations leads to enhanced returns.

One of the issues is that Americans in recent years have been less mobile than in the previous few decades. This is due in part to greater choice on the front end but also to income declines which reduce the attractiveness of potential employment opportunities. However, this also constricts the flow of information about job openings. The advantage of this program to Facebook is that it is a feel-good effort that doesnt cost them much. It also provides a competitive opening that may help them learn how to poach more activity from LinkedIn which has established a reputation for online job search dominance.

While unlikely to put much of a dent in the national unemployment count, this does suggest that both the government and Facebook are conscious of the unemployment/underemployment factor in framing national attitudes. That they perceive advantages in claiming credit for active contributions, however dubious, it is encouraging that organizations like Facebook recognize the market opportunity and are working to seize it. That alone may be signal that positive, scalable change is achievable. JL

Mike Flacy reports in Digital Trends:

For the millions of unemployed Americans that spend time perusing the lives of their friends on Facebook, the social network is teaming up with the U.S. government to help bring attention to job openings.

Announced earlier today, Facebook and the United States Department of Labor are collaborating to bring more visibility to three million job openings. This initiative is called the Social Job Partnership
and also combines the efforts of the National Association of Colleges and Employers, the National Association of State Workforce Agencies and the DirectEmployers Association. Facebook will be targeting areas of high unemployment through geographic data and posting public service announcements to draw attention to the new effort as well as the main Facebook page for the Social Job Partnership.

Labor Secretary Hilda Solis is also hoping to branch out to other social networking sites such as Twitter and LinkedIn to bring more attention to the Social Job Partnership. According to research conducted by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, over 70 percent of career centers already have a Facebook page setup to help the unemployed find jobs. Another recent survey from Jobvite found that 89 percent of employers are planning to use social networks to recruit new candidates and 64 percent of recently employed people were hired through contact on a social network.

Partners will be able to create delivery systems to roll out new job postings on Facebook more efficiently, likely helpful for Facebook’s audience of over 850 million members. When asked if Facebook poses a threat at the Web 2.0 Summit earlier today, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman stated that he didn’t believe Facebook was a competitor to LinkedIn. According to a Nielson study conducted this year, Internet users with a post-graduate degree are three times more likely to visit LinkedIn over other social networks. LinkedIn’s demographic also skews towards a much older group than Facebook, mostly averaging in the early to mid-40s. However, LinkedIn’s total user base is approximately 15 percent the size of Facebook’s total user base as of the end of June 2011.