How will Facebook’s Graph Search Impact the Staffing Industry?

As you’ve likely heard by now, Facebook, recently unveiled a potential revolutionary game-changer that could impact the staffing and recruiting industry…Graph Search. This tool will allow in depth searching of Facebook user profiles, which could be quite useful to recruiters looking for talent. Whether you’re a believer or not, the fact that Facebook has 1 billion users is reason to take note.

According to ABC News, the innovative search engine could potentially modify the way the world uses Facebook.

Facebook_Graph_Search“Until now, the search bar you saw when you logged in to your Facebook page wasn’tvery powerful. You could only search for Timelines – your friends’ pages, other peoples’ public pages and business or product changes. But now, after close to a year and a half of development, the new “Graph Search” will allow you to search and discover more about your friends and other information that’s been put on the world’s largest social site.”

Even though the release of Graph Search is only in the beta version, it is speculated to have the capability to transform numerous industries. One business that could benefit from the new Graph Search Engine is the world of recruitment and staffing.

Stephane Le Viet, CEO of Work4Labs, fully explains the new product and how it relates to the staffing world in her article for Forbes.com.

“Graph Search will change the game again. It allows passive and active candidates to become recruits. As this product rolls out and improves over the next few months, recruiters will have a chance to search for whom their unfilled jobs are relevant. That relevance is the most exciting part…Graph Search is about discovering people—their work history, their education, their interests and their motivations—and using that discovery to recruit better.”

In response to a blog post about Facebook’s Graph Search by John Zappe of ERE, Glenn Gutmacher, founder of recruiting-online.com, is more apprehensive and cites concerns over Graph Search’s dependence on user content.

“Its usefulness as a recruiting tool is limited by the number of users who have complete profiles.” If the data that Facebook uses in order to generate results is the sum of your posting history, group affiliations and friends, then recruiters and sources are going to be frustrated by a lot of false positive results..”

Gutmacher goes on to ad that, “The most hopeful part of this article was the link to Facebook’s profile completion testing. Hopefully it will push people beyond just filling out their city and start asking for the data that recruiters need to separate wheat from chaff (e.g., current job title and company, if not skills).”

If implemented correctly, it is rumored that the Facebook Graph Tool may empower job seekers to market themselves in new ways, similar to LinkedIn. If that becomes reality, recruiters will have yet another go-to source to uncover the best talent. How do you think Facebook’s graph search will impact staffing and recruiting? Not sure? Here’s a collection of recent articles that shed more light on the subject.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jjcolao/2013/01/28/graph-search-and-online-recruiting-how-facebook-is-transforming-an-industry/

http://mashable.com/2013/01/27/graph-search-recruiting/

http://www.ere.net/2013/01/29/facebooks-graph-search-is-the-future-of-social-recruiting/

http://socialmediatoday.com/node/1204926

http://www.blogging4jobs.com/social-media/how-the-new-facebook-graph-could-benefit-recruiters/

http://theundercoverrecruiter.com/infographic-how-use-facebook-social-recruiting/

http://www.facebook.com/about/graphsearch

Image Credit: niallkennedy

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