Article: Is Facebook Graph Search good news for recruiters?

Talent Acquisition

Is Facebook Graph Search good news for recruiters?

With a diverse user base as its advantage, can Facebook Graph Search offer a real competition to the likes of LinkedIn? Can it prove to be a boon for recruiters?
Is Facebook Graph Search good news for recruiters?
 

It is too early to predict whether it can be a potential competition for well established networking platforms such as LinkedIn

 

Post a recruitment query and you’ll have at your disposal a list of all potential candidates and that too from your own network. That’s what Facebook Graph Search is. Given the accuracy of search results that it promises, it has already created a lot of buzz.
At the unveiling of Facebook Graph Search, CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, gave something to the recruiters to look forward to, when he demonstrated how the Graph Search could be used for recruiting. In reference to the Graph Search, Zuckerberg was quoted as saying, “One of my favorite queries is recruiting.” He entered a query ‘Engineers at Google who are friends of engineers at Facebook’ and showed the accurate search results. With the wide user base advantage that Facebook has, Graph Search may affect the way recruiters search for potential candidates, in the future.

How is it different from web search engines?
In an interview to Dan Farber, Editor-in-Chief of Cnet, Facebook’s Engineering Director Ras Rasmussen said, “Most of the content you will find through Graph Search is not public content. So, as a result, if we compare any web search engine to Facebook’s Graph Search, there is very little overlap in the data that we are actually searching for. We are a very different product (sic).”
Unlike the web search engines, Facebook Graph Search will search the information within the Facebook platform. So, if a recruiter enters the query ‘Engineers from IIT’, Graph Search will search through the information filled in by the user’s friends, friends’ friends (and so on) to show relevant profiles based on the users connections on Facebook. It will also show the common connection between the search results and the recruiter, helping him find a way to reach out to people.
FB Graph Search is still in its Beta phase. So, it is too early to predict whether it can be a potential competition for well established networking platforms such as LinkedIn, or give any competition to career search engines. One advantage that Facebook has is its wide user base. However, most of its users do not fill their professional details on their FB profiles. So, it is highly unlikely that in its current format Facebook will be of much help to the recruiters searching for potential candidates (unless they wish to search for a candidate on FB Graph Search and check out his credentials on other networks like LinkedIn). However, one cannot be sure that this is all that Graph Search will have in the future too. During the launch of Graph Search, Mark Zuckerberg said, “Graph Search is a really big project. Eventually we want to index all the posts and all of the content on Facebook.” His comment gives a hint that Graph Search may turn out to be the next big thing.

The limitations:
1. Though FB users can no longer hide their profiles from search functions, the results that the Graph Search will show will be limited by its users’ privacy settings. So, while accessing someone’s profile a user will not be able to see the content that the owner of the profile hasn't shared with him.
2. FB profiles do not give users the space or option to write about their work experience. As compared to the detailed work information that people can write in their LinkedIn profiles, FB profiles may not prove to be very effective.
Facebook users aren't known to fill in their professional details on their profile pages. So, one problem Facebook will face is that of insufficient data. However, since the product is still in Beta phase, one may hope that the picture will be quite different when its final version is released.

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Topics: Talent Acquisition, #Social Media

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