I read a story recently about a guy who, through sheer happenstance, managed to fix his entire life. He had gotten laid off of his job and was getting desperate. He usually picked up the New York Post and applied to the jobs he saw there.
This time they were out of the Post, so he grabbed the Times. He saw an ad for a job fair. He went to the fair. The fair was practically empty, but the employers were desperate, the first recruiter he meets basically just takes his info down, tells him where to report to and when he starts.
The job fair folks didn't realize that blue collar workers didn't read the Times, so that's the reason why the fair was empty.
Blue collar job matching still appears to be a blue ocean and Facebook seems to be uniquely positioned to serve that market. If they can get this right, this could end blue-collar unemployment overnight.
I don't know about the real numbers but I did have a similar experience. I needed somebody to do manual labor (yea, I know, I am lazy) and was having a hard time finding any in a high unemployment country.
I told my friend about how there is no single guy despite the unemployment. His reaction was "oh, really? They are in that coffeeshop just around all day waiting for jobs".
Turns out sitting there all day was their way to advertise. You just talk to the waiter about what you need and if it requires some speciality (painting, plumbing, etc...) and he points you right to the few guys who do it.
I'm not sure if Facebook will help them since my country has a low gdp/hdi but this might be otherwise for the developed and more connected world.
I'll piggyback on your comment as my sentiment is the same. This is far from the worst thing Facebook has done. It seems to address an unmet need. Maybe it will end up creepy and full of unforeseen consequences (like everything else FB) if nearly all non-office job seeking moves to FB, but for now it's helping people.
(And also, Striper Sniper Tackle is a fabulous name for a fishing store.)
Well... One thing job sites are very hesitant to do is qa. Jobs that aren't jobs. Listings without salary brackets. Where I live (Dublin) most jobs on job boards don't even mention the company name. This is because they're posted by recruiters that way, to avoid being routed around or tipping off the competition. Often the job doesn't exist, they're just resume fishing.
LinkedIn has similar issues.
I think there's hay to be made just on requiring a minimum amount of (ideally structured) information.
I've been on the hunt for a while and I'll echo these sentiments. Indeed, Zip, Monster, LinkedIn, most of them are just 'ghost' jobs. Maybe they already have an internal candidate, maybe they have had the posting up for 2 years, maybe they are recruiters that are just fishing idly. There's a million reasons, but they all end up being just a time suck and resume black-hole.
Look, I know: network. That's the way to get work. But I suck at networking. I don't feel that it's because I'm unsociable, it's that I don't know anyone that that is working at a place that is hiring. All my contacts are in my same boat of shitty jobs in a shitty area (biotech-denver)
Does anyone know how to break out into another region where you don't know anyone? How to do remote-networking?
I'm not even lying when I say this: 2 out of my last 3 jobs as a remote site reliability engineer have come from Reddit. They were contract gigs, and you have to do a bit more work vetting folks, but every now and then you'll find a recruiter who actually knows wtf they're doing with tech people.
So yeah, 2/3 in 5 years getting quality remote jobs via reddit of all places.
Oh man, I've done a lot of this. The problem is that everyone else is trying to get a job too, there aren't really any employers here despite the med campus. Thanks for the tip though.
I agree with everything you say, but I also think that it's incredibly unlikely Facebook will curate jobs any more than they do the rest of the content in Facebook. You're right about the opportunity to improve recruitment in these aspects, but it's not going to be Facebook that does it.
Where Facebook overlaps with the real world it is quite a strong service. What limits them from extending further is that their revenue is dependent on competing with time spent offline.
Except in your example, blue collar doesn't appear to use the internet to find jobs or job fairs, even if they have a Facebook account.
This reads like a pitch for smart devices for baby boomers. Sure it's a blue ocean, but most retirees don't use smart devices, even though they may have a cell phone.
> most retirees don't use smart devices, even though they may have a cell phone.
Really would love a citation for that. My dad is 74, my step mom is retired in her late 60s, all of their church group of about 35 people — every single one has a tablet or smart phone. That’s anecdotal obviously, but this sample is a mix of retired blue and white collar people at a variety of incomes (and ethnic backgrounds.)
Retired boomers are a huge smart device market from my experience.
That seems like a hurdle that Facebook of all companies could leap if they set their minds to it. Also, there is anecdotal evidence in this very HN post of the contrary.
And I think you underestimate the utility of technological aids for old people. They are using them, more now than ever.
> If they can get this right, this could end blue-collar unemployment.
Blue-collar unemployment isn't due to the lack of a sophisticated job search engine, it's due to not having enough jobs. Those jobs have been lost to process improvement and automation and they're not coming back.
They need training and education, not simply a blue-collar LinkedIn.
I don't think there is any reason to not think that there's a lot of inefficiency in the job marketplace that a large tech service that literally their entire market uses couldn't vastly clear up.
What I'm more worried about is that Facebook will drop the ball.
There's definitely inefficiency but I was replying to the notion that this would be a cure for blue-collar unemployment. It's not even going to make a dent.
The article itself shows a lot of screenshots which are specifically service jobs, also referred to as "pink-collar". Those are indeed rapidly on the rise and generally underrepresented in LinkedIn (https://poachedjobs.com is the go-to for food & drink) so I think it could be successful there.
But to suggest Facebook Jobs will be the panacea for blue-collar unemployment is sheer ignorance.
Having redesigned a hospital's recruitment process to use Facebook advertising for the more "blue collar" type jobs (porters, support workers, estates type jobs as well as nurses) I can really see this working.
We got ridiculous traction in the local area. We were reaching people who had never really thought of a career at their local hospital. But a hospital isn't just doctors.
Often with Facebook we didn't actually directly hit the candidate either. People's mum, uncle, brother or friend would find the advert and pass it on.
Facebook is already successful in recruitment. Only makes sense they really target this market and provide the business tools to do it
I come from a blue collar background, and have a large blue collar network on Facebook. I regularly see people posting about jobs, sharing that they are looking for jobs, etc. It will often be in just a generic post along the lines of "x construction is looking for laborers, $20 an hour call #" then reshared a hundred times.
I think a formalized and well designed way of doing this could work and a have a large benefit.
There's some who argue that having all of your life in one place, recorded, won't be a problem because society will be forced to shift in a more liberal direction and stop judging people. The alternative outcome is that this forces a hard crystallization around various very specific cultures, where for every community there's a list of "weird stuff that everyone does," and "stuff that gets you ostracized." So for example going to furry conventions might end up assigned to Googlers, and going to church assigned to machinists. That seems a lot more likely, given human nature.
As a young man I had a few friends and acquaintances who intimated that they had been stalked. My ex wife shared a story of being stalked by a deputy sheriff. And I can’t recall now but she may have been underage at the time to boot.
Pretty quickly I saw a pattern. People who don’t want privacy have never cared about someone who really needed it. Or needed it themselves.
If you think you might be queer, molested, or your neighbor might be in a hate group but you’re not sure, if you think your kid is doing drugs, you can’t just voice these opinions without putting someone in literal mortal peril. And there are a host of other things that might get you stigmatized. If you are in a bizg city that’s not a big deal. Find new people. But if you’re in a small town...
It's really everyone, if they know what's good for them - no matter how "normal" you are, there is always somewhere on earth where you would end up marginalized if you found yourself there for some reason. Nobody's traits are centered in every culture.
In the USA, homosexuals earned legal rights because they were forced out of hiding by violent police, leading them to fight back, win allies, and secure rights. Having secrecy also forces secrecy, weakening political power. It's a bloody war for sure, but a winnable war with long-term improvement.
I wonder whether the whole idea of a single “authentic” identity to present to friends, family, colleagues, etc. is fundamentally flawed. Humans are social beings, and that necessitates a certain agreeableness, which implies fluid and context-dependent social identities for each person. Not doing so affects range and depth of experience, IMHO.
In a bid to capture all aspects of your “true” identity (that too, for marketing purposes) Facebook is trying to force legibility [1] on something it fundamentally doesn’t understand. If it succeeds, then we might have the largest disaster caused by a bureaucracy, the kind one has learned to expect from reckless government planning [1,2].
>society will be forced to shift in a more liberal direction and stop judging people
Really? This hasn't been my experience at all. FB can be just as toxic as e.g. a youtube comment section, and what I see more often than not is people self selecting based on who agrees with them nearly 100% of the time.
Right, but the theory (which I'm arguing against, see above), is that if economic rewards are grafted on to the social side then people will become more open so that they can become more economically successful. Youtube comments and today's FB aren't economic - there are few incentives against bubbling yourself beyond personal gratification.
Sorry, poor wording on my part. I didn't mean to imply you were supporting that theory, I had never heard it before and was just shocked that _anyone_ believes it.
No... Just no! Facebook crawls into every portion of our lives. I killed my account because of its insidious feature creep.
You don't put up photos of yourself in a swimsuit at work and would sue any workplace that demanded that you show them those pictures.
You shouldn't bring your political beliefs into work, and would be uncomfortable if your boss cornered you and demanded to know how you felt about the president or some tax policy.
But, this is content that is often on your Facebook page. By moving employeer/applicant relationships onto Facebook, it's associating applicants personal lives into the sphere of employer consideration.
It's wrong and I hope that nobody takes this seriously.
Facebook is chock full of information that is illegal to ask about in job applications like marital and family status, sexual orientation, age, religion, etc. If this feature saw much adoption it seems like it would only result in greater discrimination.
Beyond that, this move is surprising to me because we've been seeing a lot of stories lately about Facebook struggling to get people to post original content after letting the platform go wild with politicized third-party content and advertisements. I can't imagine a better way to make Facebook less comfortable and fun than to turn it into a resume site.
While I generally agree with the sentiment that facebook and job sites are like oil and water, how would discrimination with this tool work differently than just searching for an applicant on facebook today? I wouldn't imagine this information would be surfaced alongside the resume, so it would still require an employer to actively take steps to discriminate.
It's different because you can set your profile privacy to "Friends Only" so prospective employers can't look at your info. Facebook, however, has access to all that data and who knows if/how they might discriminate (doubtful it would be explicit/intentional, but it's easy to accidentally let bias creep into machine learning algorithms).
Wouldn't Facebook be the single best equipped company to stop potential discrimination?
E.g. You submit an application for a job posting - once that application is opened, Facebook could block anyone who has used that IP in the past 30 days from accessing your profile.
I imagine Facebook is where most publicly accessible personal data is, if they could be compelled to, by PR or law, they could dramatically curb discrimination.
That would be trivial to circumvent (pick up your phone and browse their profile from that) and would have false negatives (large company with many users behind NAT).
It's different because there weren't hundreds of people working on and marketing a tool that actively couples this behavior with actual hirings. Now, there are.
I was going to say.. just like you should be able to walk anywhere in any large city and feel safe, but the reality simply doesn't work that way. There are too many injustices and not enough time or money to litigate them all for the average person.
I’m pretty sure I remember an article on HN a while back talking about employers demanding applicants’ social media passwords as conditions of employment, so they can go through and look for this stuff. So, in reality the applicants’ personal lives are already in the sphere.
People ask for things they can’t ask for all the time. Being a property manager in Seattle pretty much seems to require willful ignorance of renters rights because they make money off of your ignorance.
My first job out of school I never had a non-compete because I refused to sign the first one and told them to give me another one, which they promptly forgot.
It said I couldn’t work in Internet Technology for a period of two years. My entire resume and focus. Yeah I’m not signing that. It’s just a formality it’s not a big deal. Well if it’s not a big deal you can change it right?
I believe some states have made legislation to prevent that.
But why would anyone ever want to work for a company that would even attempt that sort of thing? That is clearly a sign that they will not respect work/life balance.
>But why would anyone ever want to work for a company that would even attempt that sort of thing?
Sometimes you don’t have a choice. The only place I worked where they demanded this was my first job out of college and I’d already been selling plasma and working part time third shift at a warehouse trying to keep my apartment while I was job hunting.
It’s scummy but sometimes you need money and can’t say no, and employers know that. Especially unskilled positions or entry level jobs where you have zero leverage.
That was my intention, if a company requires that sort of info and invasion of privacy, they are going to be a terrible company to work for. Out of necessity some people will need to work for those terrible companies. In an ideal world, those companies should be told outright to "pound sand" or less politely to fuck off.
To this day I'm disappointed that no potential employer has asked me for this kind of information during the interview process. I am genuinely curious what kind of emotional response a hiring manager would display when told to go fuck themselves in front of a room of their coworkers.
This is my concern as well. Most people using LinkedIn use it in a way that keeps it devoid of political flame wars, pictures of you throwing up after a night of drinking, check-ins at the movies you're going to, etc. But Facebook is just rife with personal life information. I don't even use Facebook all that much, but I can guarantee that I wouldn't want to apply for a job using my FB profile.
linked in is basically a separate facebook account with less photos and personal details. just make a new fb account for jobs with less photos and personal details
the social network can only share as much as you give it, its up to you to keep that content personal and offline. i’m not a huge fan of this concept that people give tons of info to these personal dat selling websites and shouldn’t be responsible for it, it’s the companies that shoulder all responsibility. everyone should be well versed in online sharing
> Why should I not bring my politics to work? Isn't bringing politics to work what got us the 40 hour work week and the weekend?
There are different kinds of politics. There's the old saying "never discuss politics or religion at the dinner table," and I think the "politics" there are the kind that are more akin to religious belief: beliefs that are strongly held, where compromise is difficult or impossible, and have big emotional components. An example are the big divisive social issues, talk about figurehead politicians, or touchy current events. For these topics, there's a high likelihood that a bitter argument or fight will break out if they come up in mixed company.
I think the politics or worker-organization among peers are totally different and very appropriate for the workplace. There's going to be a level of solidarity between the people discussing them that encourages empathy, and actual social good can come from the discussion.
Even for the politics that "got us the 40 hour work week and the weekend", I think the integration is problematic. Essentially Facebook has traditionally been a social network first, and many people's Facebook activity feed reflect more what they do "off hours" and are more conversational in nature. It is relatively easy to skim profile feeds (entire histories of data), and it just seems like it isn't a big step to imagine nefarious employers running sentiment analysis on Facebook timelines just to eliminate characteristics they don't like... including characteristics it is illegal to discriminate against now.
For instance, in the politics that "got us the 40 hour work week and the weekend" it is illegal to overtly not hire someone just because they expressed sympathetic pro-union views (https://www.nlrb.gov/rights-we-protect/whats-law/employers/d...). But what stops an employer with direct links to a profile from running analysis on posts exactly for that? Such a thing it seems would be hard to detect.
Oh, I totally agree, this is a terrible, terrible feature for Facebook to implement and push. People's Facebook profiles are going to bring in all the divisive kind of politics and little of the worker-solidarity type.
You also make a good point about this enabling deniable illegality in the hiring process.
I was just only trying to clarify the kinds of politics that belong at work and the kind that doesn't in my comment, with little to no reference to the Facebook angle of the OP.
Sure, I agree with your implication there, but you never know what peer-worker has goals of becoming your manager and in the case of labor organization, might benefit from informing mangers/owners of peer-worker organization. What are we left to do then?
The feelings underlying my comments here are that I think it's important to not shy away from divisive topics in the workplace. OpSec only goes so far. At some point we must take risks to create a better future and creating an environment that nurtures open and honest discussion, even if divisive.
> The feelings underlying my comments here are that I think it's important to not shy away from divisive topics in the workplace.
I agree conditionally, since there isn't one kind of "divisive" topic. Some kinds should be avoided, which are the ones people usually are talking about when they say politics should be avoided the workplace. The main thing that comes from them are disruption, polarization, and nasty feelings. Other kinds, like ones that are "divisive" between workers and owners, should be tolerated or even encouraged, since they are appropriate to the context and can lead to genuine improvement within it.
Maybe divisive politics would be an adequate qualifier? Workers’ rights don’t generally relate to people’s self-identities the way issues like Church vs State do, for example.
A few months ago I turned off Facebook notifications on my phone. Then I turned off Messenger notifications. I recently deleted the Facebook app. A month ago, the Messenger app moved to page two. Two weeks ago I deleted both from my phone (still have WhatsApp) and force myself to log out when I visit on my laptop.
I'm not sure this is the level of disconnection I'll remain at. (Maybe only in election years.) I do think it's a gentle enough curve that everyone should try it.
When I ask friends whom, among Facebook, Apple, Google, Netflix and Amazon, they trust most, the results are heterogenous. When I ask whom they trust least, it's universally Facebook. If you don't trust someone, they may not have your best interests at heart; keeping them close is like holding on to a toxic friend.
Facebook seems to have adopted the dark pattern of messenger notifications of "1" even after I have deleted all chats.
Every time I open the facebook app I am alerted of a new message. I've gone so far as to file a report with facebook, but have not heard back. I assume this behavior is intentional at this point.
They do the same for me in the FB app on the Marketplace section. They’ll put a red icon down there that makes me visit that section to make it go away.
Unfortunately the only things I see on there are cars where the list price is $1 but when you open the ad it’s actually $20k. I’ve reported those to Facebook as scams but the response was “these are legitimate ads” so there’s no reason to go back. Other than that damn red icon.
I have had that happen at times with Marketplace also, which is pretty much another garbage feature on FB. My usage has personally declined drastically as they continue to introduce more features.
Their getting pretty aggressive with their notifications. I'm getting tons of friend x updated their status or other minor minor items they wouldn't send a notification for before, I suppose their trying to get people to reengage
On the meta subject of notifications: I've disabled all sounds and vibrations of my personal phone and I make frequent use of the snooze functions (either app level or os level). I feel like it's also good starting point.
> I ended up going on the app to see if there was anything new
Deleting the app makes you aware of how frequently one gets the subconscious urge to do that. (Same with logging out on the computer.) Once you add that friction, it becomes easier to become conscious of the behavior and then decide if, in a car between meetings, what you really want to do is scroll through Facebook.
This to me is the very slow and then sudden death of things like Facebook. People will casually stop using just as they casually were using them.
And then one day, the numbers decline enough and people don't care much about Facebook anymore.
It's almost inevitable in business I feel. Enough higher-up business people at a corporation make safer and safer decisions, take less and less risks, until the corporation just starts acquiring companies to stay relevant.
Yes. I'm more productive, spend less time pissing over semantics with my conservative friends (we still disagree, but more so in person or over text, where (a) it feels different, because one isn't playing to an audience and (b) I tend to learn things versus just getting pissed off), and more relaxed. I also noticed my sleeping patterns have become healthier.
> Meanwhile, job seekers can discover openings, auto-fill applications with their Facebook profile information
And soon we will need discussion on how a job seeker is being shunned at a workplace for his/her personal views which came bundled with these auto-fill forms.
I can be wrong but whenever I read stuff like these it seems to me companies, specially social networking, are running out of ideas and just scraping the bottom of the barrel for ideas.
Agreed. Facebook has a ton of engineers sitting around (not designers, engineers). Only so many can data mine and work on advertising, so some portion of them will look around and decide "what if we just add in random feature x from other thing y!" and eventually some get approval. It's really nonsensical from a user perspective. I can't imagine what user would ask for this.
And because of the scale of Facebook, there's no penalty for this not working out. So they will just keep pushing random features and will see what sticks. See stories, their AI chatbot assistant in messenger, and I suspect this will suffer the same fate.
"Must apply via our Facebook listing - please have the show all photos checkbox selected" - Granted, that probably won't affect white collar workers as heavily
Do do believe Facebook is on it's way out, but I created a fake real-name profile to guard against a future where it's more ubiquitous and I'm expected to give others access to it.
I've seen a number of my more blue-collar friends use Facebook as a job site on and off for years. I suspect that to a lot them, this will mostly be a formalization of things they already do.
This is so wrong on so many levels, I don't even know where to start. I was told for years and years to keep my business life separate from my personal life.
It's actually quite scary people are going to fall for it and use this and in the process, hand over a myriad of information that should be protected, solely for the purposes of screening people based on their personal life and their choices therein.
It may not happen, though. Social networks tend toward natural monopolies. Facebook may have better features and uptime than the next best alternative (or not), but either way, social networks gain most of their utility from all the people on then.
So it's notable that linkedin survived this consolidation. I think this is because people want to keep their business and professional lives distinct. It's actually more than that. There's a comment lower about how Facebook is creepy, and linkedin is pushy. There's a very good reason those are the notable faults identified.
Think of this scenario: a programmer goes to a business meeting with some people form ops and marketing after a conference, and they have lunch or coffee afterwards. Some linkedin invites follow. It might seem a little pushy to some, not to others, but most people (from my observation) wouldn't consider it inappropriate. It's "ok" to be a bit more direct and immediate with business contacts. The same thing with Facebook might seem creepy.
I suspect linkedin or something like it will hang on precisely because it isn't a "social" network.
I find it a bit uncomfortable with the repetitive use of "low-skill" in the article. You can actually be skillful in areas outside of STEM, finance and business.
"Skill," in economics, is a function of training time. "Occupations that require less than 12 months of training and" have a high incidence of employees "with a high school diploma or less" were defined as "low-skill" going back to the 60s [1].
High-skill workers are expensive to make, expensive to hire and expensive to replace. The tolerable level of turnover amongst high-skill staff, to the average company, is low. (At least in comparison with low-skill staff, who can be more-easily replaced.)
In the short run, this may be a great revenue-growth opportunity for Facebook.
That said, prospective employees will want to look their best for prospective employers, and vice versa, so I have a nagging feeling that the job-posting initiative will further accelerate Facebook's ongoing transition from a network of genuine profiles and social connections to a network of puffed-up, cleaned-up social resumes and necessarily superficial connections.
I say "ongoing" because many Facebook profiles have already become puffed-up, cleaned-up social resumes, and many Facebook connections have become superficial links between people who may not necessarily like or even want to spend time with each other.
Great, now it's just a matter of time until recruiters start trying to contact me via FB. In which case... that will be the end of my FB usage.
In less snarky terms, spam is the bane of nearly every "jobs" site I've ever seen. Since FB attracts such a wide net, i.e., not very technical and skilled folks, it will be a significant challenge to make any kind of jobs/careers feature not turn into a noise-fest as they grow it. I wish them luck.
I'm fairly anti-Facebook but this is actually a great idea. A big reason for unemployment is the inefficiencies it takes to take all the steps from motivating yourself in finding a job to getting hired. A lot of unemployed sometimes need a kick in the butt because it's hard to constantly be on the lookout for opportunities (been there), so this partly eliminates the first step of making the decision to get you stuff together and look for jobs by making it come directly to you. Good job Facebook!
I actually like this. Linkedin is very annoying sometimes, but it gives nice exposure to the job market if you're looking for opportunities.
Facebook did a great job with buying/selling stuff that matches and complements craigslist for example. This gave a lot of power to communities which don't use craigslist much outside the US.
I think they can do a nice job to have people get more exposure in the job market when they need to and become a better job market than linkedin.
I think we should be more pragmatic in the tools we use and just encourage the usage of better tools in the right way. Facebook is horrible as a content or social network because of our behaviour in using it as so. But they do great tools and we should fix our usage of these tools.
I asked on Facebook, people recommended a tiler who had a Facebook page, I looked at the reviews there, and the photos they had posted, and then I sent them a message over Facebook Chat, we agreed a price/time, and they came and carried it out.
This was all incredibly easy, and much less stressful than most times I've needed someone to do this kind of work.
I don't understand this complaint. Facebook should avoid offering job advertisements because... some people won't use it out of their own choice, therefore classism? Maybe I'm misinterpreting, but I can't follow the logic.
Both LinkedIn and Facebook accounts are free for anyone to create and use to their full extent. How is this service not a net positive if it gets people legitimate jobs? Is that not competition? Isn't more options a good thing?
I mean looking at so called Temp Work companies: in some sense they arbitrate jobs. Most of those happen to be quite low end. Speaking of Germany, when these are "hands-on positions" in big companies they compete with non-temp people. The difference is that they have worse pay, less insurance coverage and generally less say.
Others already made statistics and articles about this topics. It seems the workers loose.
LinkedIn is trying to be the blue-collar LinkedIn (plumbers, florists, machinists etc) but I don't know how effective they have been. FB seems like they have the reach
Job application via Facebook? No way I'm going down that route.
By the way... It seems to me that "youngsters" are slowly realizing that heavy social media (a-la Facebook, that wants to know everything about you and wants to follow every aspect of your life, intruding wherever possible) is higly toxic, and it's trying to expand to other "market areas".
The problem I have with this is that job applications are one of the only instances where I use real data for my personal information (besides when dealing with heavily regulated industries like banks). So now Facebook is collecting treasure troves of data on people via this job application tool.
Older blue-collar workers are pretty much the only demographic left on Facebook, so I suppose this makes sense. Personally, I don't think I've logged in this year yet -- all my social circles have moved on to other networks.
This could turn out really well for them. I've got several friends, from real estate agents to concert promoters to plumbers who already use Facebook in this manner.
Citation needed? That doesn’t make any sense in this context.
It’s a primary source. They know what people search for in their own site. That’s like me saying I found my job using a newspaper and you saying citation needed. I just told you what I know to be true.
Do you go around snapping ‘citation needed’ at anyone who tells you anything about their business? Madness.
Respectfully no, but it would be relevant to understand the methodology of how they were able to discern a 1-in-4 statistic which seems, on its face at least, questionable at best. Maybe they're right and the methodology might be sound, but it doesn't change my perspective without that backing information to contextualize it.
A "primary source" also isn't in any way immune to rational inquiry. I don't mean for this parallel in any way to imply a relationship, but just look at our administration or any one of innumerable other examples to this end. Taking something at face value, to me at least, requires more than a decontextualized statement of fact when my immediate impulse is to question it (in this particular case).
For instance, define "job". Are we talking about a recommendation leading to a project for a contractor, or are we talking a full-time position? I mean, that's just the start. In what ways are they determining what constitutes "finding a job"? Talking to friends and friends of friends? Or directly messaging a corporation's page on Facebook?
There's a lot of squish here and I wish they were more forthcoming about what that statistic actually means.
It sounds like you just want more information on how they determined this. That's not what 'citation' means.
A citation is a reference to a document where information came from in the first place. What document are you expecting to be cited here? A citation for some internal Facebook email where a manager asked for a stat and the data guys responded with a number? How's that going to help you if it's just the same number as in here?
If I tell you I saw a cat in my garden, and you demand 'citation needed', what do you want me to cough up? There's no document to cite. That's just me telling you what I saw.
It's as simple as citing a document that lays out how they arrived at this statistic. With all due respect, perhaps it's pleading for an ideal here, but it still remains a questionable statistic in my opinion.
I don't understand why questioning a statistic, or especially my use of the word "citation", is controversial.
Literally who do you think they could cite? Who else apart from Facebook knows what people on Facebook search for? You can't cite someone else for data you have collected yourself. At some point the chain of citations needs to start with someone presenting some data. We can't all endlessly cite each other in a big chain.
Do you reject all new collected data because it doesn't come with a citation?
I actually like LinkedIn because hey know they are the internet’s Rolodex and (more importantly) people on the site mostly use it that way. If I were pressured by society/peers to be “active” on LinkedIn in the same way we are pressured in an abstract sense to be on Facebook, it would lose all utility for me.
And now they have put a join-wall that is hard to circumvent (erasing cookies does not seem to suffice). It is one of the reasons why I hope to never join Linkedin.
After deleting my account, I've had to look up a couple people recently and encountered that. My only thought is: "thanks LinkedIn for making yourself increasingly irrelevant"
What bugs me is getting asked by people I know in a personal context to recommend them professionally. I can vouch that they are reasonably nice, but I don't know anything about their work.
If I worked directly with someone and know they're good, I'm happy to endorse that.
This time they were out of the Post, so he grabbed the Times. He saw an ad for a job fair. He went to the fair. The fair was practically empty, but the employers were desperate, the first recruiter he meets basically just takes his info down, tells him where to report to and when he starts.
The job fair folks didn't realize that blue collar workers didn't read the Times, so that's the reason why the fair was empty.
Blue collar job matching still appears to be a blue ocean and Facebook seems to be uniquely positioned to serve that market. If they can get this right, this could end blue-collar unemployment overnight.