Is Facebook Worth It For Job Boards?

October 23, 2007

With all of the hype currently surrounding Facebook, I thought I’d see how things were stacking up for the job boards that have embraced the social network.

In the UK, Jobsite and JobTonic have taken the plunge, with CareerBuilder set to release a UK centric version soon.  In the states, CareerBuilder, Jobster, HotJobs and Indeed have joined the Facebook party; but how are the applications performing?

Of the US participants, CareerBuilder’s ‘Find A Better Job’ application seems to have won the greatest traction, with 940 daily active users. 

The performance then drops off quickly, with Jobster’s ‘Career Network’ gaining 166 daily active users and the applications from Indeed and Yahoo! HotJobs totalling less than 20 daily active users between them.

On this premise, you’d expect the usage of the Facebook applications launched by UK job boards to be fairly low.  You’d be right.

Jobsite’s application, launched in September, has 26 daily active users, and JobTonic’s has just two active daily users.

So on the face of it, things aren’t going well for the job boards in Facebook - right?  Well, yes and no. 

No one is going to argue that gaining even 1,000 daily active users is a massive success for a generalist job board, or that it will result in high volumes of applications.  But traffic is traffic, candidates are candidates and when it comes down to it, return on investment is the key.

At the current time (and until Facebook decide otherwise) the cost of entry into the Facebook space is relatively low.  There are development costs to get the application built and some promotional expenditure, but for most job boards the positive PR of entering Facebook negates these costs automatically.

With the initial ‘cost of entry’ paid for from the marketing budget, the ongoing operational aspects then have to add up.  It’s a case of looking at the continual costs of supporting the application long-term.  This is hard to calculate, nobody knows how the social network’s platform will evolve over time, but it should be possible to make an estimate. 

If the operational costs are small, building even a low activity Facebook application could be worth the effort.

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© Photographer:Andy Brown | Agency: Dreamstime.com

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3 Comments »

1. […] Apart from that, on the same blog, I suggest you to read yet another article by Julian, in which he talks about Facebook and the job boards that have developed applications in order to drive more traffic (and candidates) to their sites. Very interesting figures and conclusions: Is Facebook worth it for job boards? […]

   Pingback by Are Video CVs or resumes useful and how are job boards doing on Facebook? — October 25, 2007 @ 12:23 pm

2. […] or indeed have already placed web applications on Facebook to drive more traffic to their jobs (with more or less success as it seems), Google’s project might be of even more importance to those and other career opportunity […]

   Pingback by Google’s OpenSocial: Job Boards get prepared to dip into the Social Networks’ audiences — November 4, 2007 @ 6:04 pm

3. […] In het licht van de komst van OpenSocial en het daarmee gepaard gaande ´open gaan´ van Hyves staat er een interessant artikel bij The Born podcast over het succes van jobboards op Facebook. Is Facebook worth it for jobboards? […]

   Pingback by Het succes van sociale netwerk applicaties | HRlog.nl — November 4, 2007 @ 8:51 pm

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