Facebook Instant Personalisation - The impact on recruitment

The idea of Instant Personalisation has brought the privacy mongers out in force as usual but for the average Facebook user is this bringing a Minority Report type World ever closer?  Not the "caught before you kill" scenario but the advertising etc tailored to you!! And in this in some people's minds is this a good thing?

First, what is it all about? Basically, Facebook are allowing certain sites (limited at the moment) access to your personal profile details so that when you visit a third party site, a special piece of Facebook code recognises you, tells the third party who you are, and then tells all your friends that you have been to their site.  Or, when you go to said site, you can see which of your friends have also been there and what they have read etc. Now that may sound bad but imagine you are on a holiday booking site, you would be able to see where your friends have been, what they said, what was good. Or, using your personal profile information, the holiday site could show you destinations that other people like you had also enjoyed and why. It may sound a little intrusive but is the content of your Facebook Profile that bad/secret? You can of course switch the sharing off if you so choose. This may be slightly inaccurate and a bit more than is envisaged but as it is still unclear how much information will be shared, I have taken a bit of liberty with the exact functionality but as it is all still unclear it is close enough. For another post on this subject read Gigaom. The image below shows the frame at the top of the website page with the option to accept or not!

So how could this impact recruitment?

Positive thoughts

Job boards could serve up more relevant jobs to you potentially removing the need for you to search and trawl through loads of rubbish. Or they could show you CV's of potential applicants if you were a recruiter maybe?

Corporate recruiters could remind you of any friends that worked for them. Or they could let you know about the running club they have (or whatever keywords they find in your profile). They could serve up jobs that are close to where you live. Dynamic data could be shown based on your interests and parts of their business that cover these. Or employees within that part of the business so that you could connect with them and ask questions.

There are loads of things that could of course happen and if Facebook can get this widely accepted, with very simple user privacy controls, then surely Linkedin and others will follow suit. Ultimately, the whole user experience could be a lot more personal and relevant.

Negative thoughts

As with any aspects of privacy, there will be people who simply do not wish to have this much information made available to others. Not so much maybe with the site experience being more personal, but the sharing of data with their friends. Oh yes, your employee XYZ appplied for a few jobs here. Or your boss was on competitor ABC career site last week. Or your best friend was shopping at....... the mind boggles as to what could be inadvertently shared. Of course Facebook won't intentionally share data but they seem to push back responsibility to Users to be aware of the changes and then go and switch OFF the sharing. It tends to be Users have to Opt Out rather than Opt In. So there will be much gnashing of teeth over the next few months as this functionality is tested over the three partner sites they have chosen; Microsoft Docs, Yelp and Pandora.

In closing

There are of course pro's and con's for this and of course from a recruitment perspective, candidates won't want to be telling the World that they are currently looking for a job and/or who they have been looking at! But if the sharing can be controlled and the personalisation still happen I personally think this concept could give the candidate a much better, more relevant, efficient experience ultimately resulting in better matched applciants for recruiters to manage. A big IF of course!

What do you think?