As someone who has spent the last few months frantically trying to find a job after returning from a 10-month teaching stint in China, I am always interested to discover new ways to get your CV out there in front of employers.
Before landing my current job at IF, I of course, like most, used LinkedIn to reach out to employers, research potential businesses or brands that could be of interest to me. To hear that Facebook are now testing a CV feature to take on LinkedIn, I was intrigued to say the least.
The biggest question that EVERYONE will ask with this potential update will no doubt be “do I really want prospective employers to see my private Facebook profile?” You can already list your job history and education, but do you really want a potential employer to scroll through your News Feed or through your endless albums of photos with the occasional NSFW pic? However, the new feature appears to pull all the relevant job information away from your status updates and personal photos, phew!
Personally, I wouldn’t mind potential employees seeing my Facebook. Over the last few months I’ve been to numerous interviews and I noticed one thing, yes employers want to hear about your work history (you still gotta have those skills), but more and more employers wanted to know about me as a person, what my interests and passions are, what drives me, how I challenge myself outside of the workplace. They want to know that the person they were potentially going to hire will fit in with the great team they already have. Here at IF we always try to hire people on a set of values that we hold close to our social hearts.
Facebook is famous for sneaking onto the turf of other platforms, we’ve seen it with Stories and now it’s getting all professional on us. In 2016, it launched Facebook At Work, now called Workplace, designed for teams in the office to use.
It could soon let users list their professional experience and education, as well as their contact details, an image, and other information in order to potentially bag themselves a job through the Facebook platform. Will this new feature really be able to take on LinkedIn? Only time will tell, but in a world where more and more people are sharing their personal lives, it’s becoming easier for potential employers to find you on your personal social channels anyway.
