4 Ways To Use Facebook To Find A Job

Susan Adams

Kevin Mueller was in his last semester at Miami University in Ohio and he hadn’t yet landed a post-graduation job. So he jumped when his marketing professor posted a status update with a link to a job opening at Launchsquad, a PR firm in San Francisco. Mueller, 22, responded to the post, which led him to connect with Miami University alumna Kristen Hay, a senior account executive at Launchsquad, who hired him.


All of our job searches should be so easy. But as social networking matures, stories like Mueller’s are increasingly common. Still, until I saw a new survey from a company called Jobvite , I thought most job seekers were using LinkedIn LNKD -6.39%, not Facebook, to find work. But according to the survey, 83% of people looking for a job say they use Facebook in their social media search, compared to 36% who use LinkedIn which, to my surprise, is the most infrequently used site among job seekers. Some 40% use Twitter and 37% use Google GOOG +0.19%+. Jobvite also surveyed recruiters, 94% of whom use LinkedIn, while 65% use Facebook, 55% use Twitter and 18% use Google+.

Jobvite cares about such numbers because it sells software that enables companies to identify and source job candidates through their employees’ social networks. To compile the survey, Jobvite ran an online poll of 2,000 people in mid December.

I was struck by the Facebook stats and I realized that while I’ve written a half dozen articles about using LinkedIn to find a job, I have never focused on Facebook as a job search tool. At 1.23 billion users, Facebook is nearly five times the size of LinkedIn, which has 259 million members. For that reason alone, job seekers should tap Facebook’s professional networking power. For advice on how best to do that, I turned to Dan Finnigan, 51, the CEO of eight-year-old Jobvite. Finnigan helped me hone these four ways that you can use Facebook to find a job.


1. Fill out your profile with your professional history.


2. Classify your friends


Read more about these two ways, all four ways, and the complete Forbes article