Facebook May Go For LinkedIn’s Jugular With New Resumé Features

While Facebook is, by far, the dominant “social” networking site, it’s rarely used for professional networking. Instead, people go to places like Microsoft’s LinkedIn when it comes time to look for a job or just put their resumés out there. But in Facebook’s quest to be all things to all users, it is testing new features that mimic much of what you’d see on LinkedIn.

Some new features are popping up in testing on Facebook, The Next Web reports.

The new fields basically expand on Facebook’s current “Work and Education” section, and let users fill in very granular-level details about their jobs, past and present. Basically, you can build in a whole resumé or CV on top of your existing personal profile, with all your job titles and the dates you held them neatly slotted in.

If you’re thinking, “But my aunts, high school classmates, and that guy I dated for three months don’t care about my job titles,” Facebook feels you. The information you add in the resumé feature doesn’t really show up on your profile.

Instead, it basically goes into a big vortex of data that, The Next Web surmises, will become accessible to recruiters and folks who post vacant jobs.

“We’re currently testing a work histories feature to continue to help people find and businesses hire for jobs on Facebook,” a spokesperson for the company confirmed to The Next Web, but declined to say if this feature would be rolled out more broadly anytime soon.

Facebook added the Facebook Jobs module to to the site early this year, to comparatively little fanfare. That service — a digital “Help Wanted” sign, more or less — allows any business with a Page to create and share job listings for their company.

While Facebook would no doubt like to entice users to consider Facebook a professional-friendly platform, and would like to get paid money by companies that list and fill positions, it may not be such a great idea for users.

Alison Green, of Ask A Manager fame, wrote in March that would-be employees should perhaps be leery of the service.

Facebook Jobs connects job seekers and job posters through Facebook Messenger — so anyone who applies for work through Facebook Jobs is, of course, connecting that application to their public Facebook profile. And that means that any employer who clicks your name to learn more about you may, indeed, learn more — a lot more. Including things that you would ordinarily leave out of a job application.

In short, there are reasons that millions of us may be wisely uneasy with combining our work and play personas — and that’s without even branching into the many lines of work, from therapy to adult entertainment, where it’s best to keep one’s friends and one’s clients in completely separate spheres.