Seems like Face­book has been try­ing to tack­le recruit­ing for a long time – and in fact, they have, over and over. I wrote about them in 2012, and again in 2018, plus many, many updates in the news posts. Well, they’re at it again.

A recent arti­cle says that the social media behe­moth is plan­ning to add a gig plat­form to the exist­ing Mar­ket­place – con­nect­ing work­ers with small job oppor­tu­ni­ties like home repair or free­lance work. Yes, kind of like TaskRab­bit, Fiverr, or UpWork, in fact. It is per­haps not coin­ci­den­tal that Cal­i­for­nia recent­ly passed a law that kept Uber and Lyft dri­vers clas­si­fied as con­trac­tors – not employ­ees. Absorb­ing even a frac­tion of the demand for gig work­ers would rep­re­sent a tidy chunk of change for Face­book – assum­ing that they grab a piece of each trans­ac­tion. The arti­cle also men­tioned that the com­pa­ny “recent­ly expand­ed e‑commerce on Insta­gram by allow­ing influ­encers to sell prod­ucts off their pro­files.”

So is this a ‘Big Move‘ by Face­book – or mere­ly an oppor­tunis­tic jump into an area that they have pre­vi­ous­ly failed to exploit? I sus­pect it’s the lat­ter. Face­book wait­ed too long on gig plat­forms to be able to buy the mar­ket leader on the cheap (unlike their moves with Insta­gram and What­sApp). The gig plat­form sec­tor of the job board indus­try has splin­tered into mul­ti­ple ‘lead­ers’ – the pre­vi­ous­ly men­tioned Fiverr and Upwork, home repair spe­cial­ists like Ang­ie’s List, plus many small­er plat­forms in nich­es such as Vet­tery.

I had always thought that Face­book would dom­i­nate the SMB job mar­ket, since many small busi­ness­es essen­tial­ly use their Face­book com­pa­ny pages as their pri­ma­ry web pres­ence. But Face­book has had plen­ty of com­pe­ti­tion in the SMB mar­ket, from old com­peti­tors like Craigslist, as well as new­er ones, like ZipRecruiter. The lat­ter no doubt caught Face­book’s atten­tion with its prepa­ra­tion for a 2021 IPO. Per­haps adding a gig plat­form is a bit of extra insur­ance?

I have no inside knowl­edge, of course. It’s entire­ly pos­si­ble that Face­book will nev­er add a gig mar­ket­place – after all, it took them a very long time to get into jobs in the first place! What I do know is that if Face­book enters the gig busi­ness, they won’t be doing so as a first mover – and they’ll have to spend a lot of mon­ey if they want to do it via acqui­si­tion.

In the mean­time, we’ll con­tin­ue to see plen­ty of gig plat­forms launch in the com­ing months – and they won’t have the Face­book name attached!

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