Facebook partners with ZipRecruiter and more aggregators as it ramps up in jobs

Facebook has made no secret of its wish to do more in the online recruitment market — encroaching on territory today dominated by LinkedIn, the leader in tapping social networking graphs to boost job-hunting. Today, Facebook is taking the next step in that process.

Facebook will now integrate with ZipRecruiter — an aggregator that allows those looking to fill jobs to post ads to many traditional job boards, as well as sites like LinkedIn, Google and Twitter — to boost the number of job ads available on its platform targeting its 2 billion monthly active users.

The move follows Facebook launching its first job ads earlier this year, and later appearing to be interested in augmenting that with more career-focused features, such as a platform to connect people looking for mentors with those looking to offer mentorship.

Today’s expansion is another development on that track. Before now, companies that wanted to use Facebook for recruiting, adding job ads to their Pages, would have had to do this directly through Facebook itself.

By partnering with ZipRecruiter and others like it, organizations will now be able to tick a box to broadcast the job add to Facebook among a wider mix of job boards that can be accessed through a one-stop shop — ZipRecruiter, as one example, covers hundreds of these boards.

Facebook’s PM for Jobs, Gaurav Dosi, is expected to make an announcement about the new integration this morning at a conference for the talent/recruitment industry.

The move is interesting because it’s a sign not just of how Facebook is looking for more volume and usage of its jobs feature, but also the realization that it may not be able to achieve this on its own steam, leading to a more friction-free, user-friendly approach.

“40% of US small businesses report that filling jobs was more difficult than they expected, which is challenging when you consider that these small businesses also employ nearly half of the country’s workforce,”Dosi said in a statement provided to us by Facebook. “Facebook’s goal is to take the work out of finding a local job and hiring the right people. This partnership with ZipRecruiter is another way we’re making the process even easier for people and businesses alike.”

The company declined to comment about more details of the deal, but from what we understand while ZipRecruiter is the lead partner, it is not an exclusive deal and Facebook with also work with others.

The other point that this deal underscores is just how fragmented the whole industry of recruitment remains today.

“In the U.S. there are over 40,000 job sites, and some historical blue-chip companies in the recruitment space, all fighting for attention,” said ZipRecruiter’s co-founder and CEO Ian Siegel, “so for Facebook to come in and be another job site… well, there is more than one way to do that.”

He added, though, that the opportunity is huge for Facebook if handled well.

Social platforms generally have very strong performance when it comes to job ads — in part because employees can tap their networks and so inbound interest tends to be less random. “They deliver good quality candidates,” Siegel said. “People who come through the network of current employees can be vouched for.” At the same time, there is less jobs noise: “People are interacting on a wide variety of subjects, not just jobs, so it feels very organic.”

And he said that a number of companies that post ads through ZipRecruiter had been requesting Facebook integration. Both he and Facebook would not comment on who approached whom for this integration.

ZipRecruiter has raised $63 million in a single round of funding in 2014, and Siegel would not comment on whether it plans to raise more.