Market Montage

LinkedIn (LNKD) has been suffering substantially the past two days after it was reported that Facebook (FB) was planning to launch a "jobs board" this summer.  Strangely a company like Monster Worldwide (MWW) which would seem far more threatened fell yesterday and today recovered all those losses.  LinkedIn – not so much.

• The board will aggregate the job postings of third-party providers, making them available for search by Facebook users.
• While these knowledgeable people said the new effort doesn't yet signal that Facebook is making a full-blown entry into the job-recruiting market, it does represent more of a threat to other professional networking sites such as LinkedIn (LNKD), should the social-networking giant get more serious about the project.
• At least three job-posting companies that currently leverage Facebook's platform will be involved in the new offering, including BranchOut, Jobvite, and Work4 Labs, the people said. Some partners have begun telling their clients about the job board, which could launch as soon as early August. Initially, Facebook doesn't plan to monetize the service, and it's unclear whether the social network aims to do so in the future.
• "It doesn't feel like a big effort that they've worked on for a long time," said one person with knowledge of the new jobs effort. "It feels lightweight." The person speculated that the effort was meant to drive user engagement on the site.

I have a hard time seeing professional recruiters utilizing Facebook as they do LinkedIn, but in the short run everything is a knee jerk reaction.  From the description above this seems like a "throwaway business" simply to drive people to the site and engage users more. That said there are some Fortune 500 companies who do utilize Facebook pages to recruit but the mixing of personal and professional business seems "dangerous" from a user's perspective, especially those in the under 35 set who put a lot more of their personal information out there for all (or many) to see.

This foray reminds me of the late 90s when nearly every Web 1.0 company created an auction site to compete with Ebay.  In the end, there was / is only one Ebay but each time a press release came out, Ebay would get hit.  There is a lot to first mover advantage.  That said, Facebook is Facebook with a ton of users so its not like Pets.com.