Facebook's Resume Feature - Should LinkedIn be worried? My take

Yesterday it was all over the tech websites, Facebook is reportedly testing a new resume feature called "work histories" that can help users share them privately.

Here are my thoughts about how this can play out:

1. Facebook is making an enterprise play. First with Workplace , the collaboration feature and then with  Facebook Jobs the job advertising feature. However, they haven't really done a great job marketing the jobs feature. If you see currently the number of jobs advertised in India is very low. As I write this is what is shown - 27 jobs in India (plus all of them seem to be with Facebook, not even sure it is used by other employers)
   
2. Facebook's big revenue features come from display advertising, sponsored posts for consumers. LinkedIn has that market cornered when it comes to employers - with their company pages and posts targeted to different kind of talent segments. So cracking this market is going to be tough for Facebook unless it invests in feet on the street to take on LinkedIn's Account Management, Sales and Customer Service. Facebook pages had talked about introducing a jobs/careers tab for adding to their business pages beginning with US and Canada, however I am not sure if this is in the priority for Facebook sales teams to pitch it to their customers
3. The big opportunity, Mobile recruitment. Where Facebook has a big edge over LinkedIn in the developing markets is the users who are solely on the platform as well as being actively engaged - the users for whom the internet is first mobile screen. These would be the blue collar workers which are not a strong point of LinkedIn. However to reach them Facebook would have to give the screen real estate to the product to make jobs a clear feature which might mean compromising on things like its news feed.
4. Microsoft and LinkedIn. Microsoft's acquisition of LinkedIn and its data getting integrated into Outlook and Office 365 is a moat that Facebook may find it difficult to cross.   
5. Facebook's perception problem. The biggest problem for Facebook is its perception of being a "social network" that is for friends and family. Whatever Facebook does in the jobs and careers space would run into that huge perception issue. At least in the white collar workforce, hence IMHO, the best bet for Facebook would be to concentrate on the blue collar workforce and focus on a "apply with Facebook" button with job sites to make the application process friction-less. The question is will they focus on it - at the cost of hurting their other revenue streams like digital advertising? And will they be able to convince the recruiting ecosystem like job sites and staffing agencies and make the products that they see value in? Time will tell, but very unlikely in my view. I hope I am proved wrong because LinkedIn can really do with some competition in this space.

Update about my LinkedIn account

So after I clicked on delete my account on LinkedIn I realised it wasn't deleted. It was still there and turning up in Google searches.

Then I got an email from someone in customer support saying my number of connections was too large for the system to delete it automatically, therefore a customer support person had to do it from the backend. And wanted to check if I was really sure if I wanted to delete it.

That made me pause.

Many friends had called me or chatted with me after my last blog post, and one thing stood out when someone said "what will people think if they can't find you on LinkedIn?"

That was when I realised how much online identities are a part of how people percieve us. Yes I have made judgements when I can't find people on Facebook and LinkedIn. I assume they are not who they claim to be .. so for that reason alone, I am not proceeding in deleting my LinkedIn account.

But I am not going to be active there. It has no use for me. However that doesn't mean it's not useful for you. People with niche skills, you have to be on LinkedIn.

HR and its role in making a "social business"

The following is an article I wrote for the National HRD Network newsletter. Would love your feedback

How Human Resources can help craft social business from Gautam Ghosh

Speaking at the #SBS2013 on 23rd May, in Mumbai

A break during the Dachis Group Social Business Summit in Austin, TX (Photo credit: Lars Plougmann)

When I started my career in the social business consulting space, there were two firms I was following closely. One was Altimeter Group the analyst firm started by Groundswell co-author Charlene Li with superstars like Jeremiah Owyang. The other was a firm that started off as a consulting firm, but has since become a social analytics product firm - The Dachis Group, fou.nded by Razorfish founder Jeff Dachis.

Three years ago Dachis Group launched a series of events called The Social Business Summit. This year in 2013 the Social Business Summit comes to India, on 23rd May.

Here are the details. And I am proud to be a speaker at the event. Hope to see you there :)