You Can Use Facebook to Find—and Apply for—Your Next Job

Facebook wants to help you find your next job. The company just launched a jobs page within the site to allow companies to advertise their career openings, as Fast Company reports. If you see a job you want to apply for, you don’t even have to leave the site to throw your hat into the ring.

The Facebook jobs page allows you to filter opportunities by location, industry, and time commitment (full-time, part-time, internship, etc.). The jobs bookmark gathers all listings in the same place, but if you’re looking for work with a specific company, corporate Facebook pages now have a jobs tab in the same toolbar where you’d look for their photos or their “about” section.

If you see a posting you like, you can apply within the site. Facebook will pre-populate the application with basic info from your profile, and then you can insert your cover letter and add relevant experience or education that isn’t on your Facebook profile as needed. You can also delete or edit information that Facebook auto-filled from your profile if necessary.

Screenshot via Facebook

It’s a great deal for Facebook, since the social media network can now become even more intertwined with the rest of your life. Even if you tire of the social aspects of the site, you'll need to maintain a profile in order to use its job-searching capabilities. And making it easier to apply for jobs is a good incentive to get people to share information about their education and past job experience on their profile, even if they previously didn’t think Facebook needed to know what high school they went to.

For users, the amazing convenience might be colored a bit by privacy implications. For one thing, you're adding to the treasure trove of (sometimes creepy) personal information Facebook already has about you. And then there's the fact that you’re throwing the doors to your social-media presence wide open for potential employers. Employers may have already looked up potential hires on Facebook to suss out any red flags that might make them think twice about a candidate, but when the job application itself is on Facebook, the process is that much easier. The jobs function lets applicants choose what information on their profile to share with the potential employers, but if you do forget to hide something damning, it won’t take any real effort on the part of your would-be boss to find it.

[h/t Fast Company]