Meta’s New Job Board Isn’t About You. It’s About AI.

After a two-year hiatus, Facebook is bringing back job postings — this time with a greater emphasis on helping young people kickstart their careers. While the move appears well-intentioned, it may also be part of a broader strategy tied to Meta’s pursuit of superintelligence, the very technology many workers fear will eventually replace them.

Indeed, artificial intelligence is continuing to shake up the labor market. According to a 2025 report from employment agency Challenger, Gray & Christmas, AI was responsible for 7,000 job cuts in the tech sector in September alone, bringing the year’s total to more than 17,000. Against this backdrop of instability, Facebook’s reentry into the job search sector may be less about connecting workers and employers and more about advancing its larger AI ambitions, as Meta races to collect user data and integrate generative AI features into every corner of its platforms. 

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What to Know About Facebook’s New Job Board 

In addition to enabling job postings on company pages and in career-focused groups, Facebook will establish a separate tab where users can view open roles on Facebook Marketplace. These jobs will be local opportunities geared mainly toward “young adults” (18 years or older) who are looking for “entry-level, trade, and service industry employment,” according to Meta, with the goal of connecting job-seekers with smaller businesses in their area. 

These are some of the platform’s primary features: 

• Direct Messages: Upon researching a company’s page, users can ask employers questions and coordinate interviews via Facebook Messenger. 
• Job Search Filters: Users can narrow down their job search based on job categories, distance and types for a better fit. 
• Customized Recommendations: Based on individual browsing history, Facebook can recommend job postings that match a user’s preferences. 
• Meta Business Suite: Besides posting jobs in groups, pages or Facebook Marketplace, businesses can also create job postings in Meta Business Suite. 

But employers can’t share just any job. According to Facebook’s policies, posts that involve adult products, multilevel marketing schemes, profanity or sexual language are not allowed on the platform. This way, younger job seekers can explore local employment options with fewer risks.   

Wait … Facebook Offered Job Postings Before? 

This actually isn’t Facebook’s first attempt to break into the job search sector. In 2017, the company released features that enabled companies to share open roles directly on their pages and users to apply for those roles right on the platform. Job postings cost nothing for employers, posing a direct challenge to LinkedIn’s paid model. 

If none of this sounds familiar, it’s probably because Meta would rather everyone forget how this project ultimately unraveled. As early as 2018, Facebook was accused of letting employers advertise discriminatory job posts — an issue that persisted years after the company supposedly took measures to address it. The initiative was rolled back near the end of 2022 and officially phased out in early 2023. 

Meta seems to have learned from its mistakes this time around, though, implementing a discrimination policy that all job postings must now follow. Still, given all the drama with Facebook’s initial attempts, why bring job postings back at all?

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Why Is Meta Launching a Job Board Again?  

No one at Meta has publicly explained why the company is reviving job posts on Facebook, but recent rumblings could reveal a larger purpose behind the move. 

College Graduates Are Struggling to Find Jobs

Now’s not a great time to be a college graduate. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, the average unemployment rate for recent college grads has risen from 3.25 percent in 2019 to 4.59 percent in 2025. It’s gotten to a point where prospective college students are questioning whether they even need a degree at all, with some opting instead to pursue the skilled trades. 

By gearing Facebook’s job platform toward “young adults,” Meta is turning this trend into an opportunity to convert college students and graduates into more regular Facebook users. In addition, major platforms like LinkedIn don’t specialize in early-career jobs, so Facebook has a chance to carve out a unique niche for itself within the job search market. 

Zuckerberg Wants Facebook to Stay Relevant 

Despite Facebook being one of the world’s most popular social networks, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has expressed concerns about the platform losing its “cultural relevance.” This fear seems to be the catalyst behind the new Facebook Friends tab, which is part of Meta’s strategy to bring the platform back to its roots through “‘OG’ Facebook experiences.” 

While ‘OG’ features are designed to evoke feelings of nostalgia among older Facebook users, a job board may be the perfect way to catch the attention of younger audiences. Connecting users to part-time and early-career opportunities could make Facebook the go-to job hub for Gen Z members, especially if America’s economic woes worsen and present aspiring professionals with even fewer lucrative tech roles in the years ahead.    

Meta Needs More Funds to Fuel Its AI Investments 

Meta has spared no expense to become an artificial intelligence powerhouse, spending millions to assemble its Superintelligence Labs division, billions to expand its AI infrastructure and possibly even more to influence U.S. elections in its favor. So, how exactly is Meta footing the bill? That’s where social media comes into play.  

The company has built out an impressive advertising empire through Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp and, of course, Facebook — all of which helped Meta rake in more than $164 billion in annual revenue in 2024. If Facebook’s job board is a success, Meta could access a whole new demographic of users with its targeted ads, generating even more revenue to bankroll its ever-growing AI portfolio.  

This also coincides with Meta’s decision to inform its targeted ads based on data gathered from chatbot conversations. An early-career job board can turn young adults into repeat users who stay on the platform for extended periods of time, facilitating more interactions with Meta’s highly refined ads. It could even serve as a means for collecting data on users’ job search habits to enhance the data sets used to train Meta’s AI models. From a business standpoint, reintroducing Facebook’s job postings seems to be a no-brainer.

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Meta Isn’t the Only Company Dabbling in Job Search 

Less than a month before Meta’s Facebook jobs update, OpenAI announced that it would be developing its own jobs platform tailored toward AI-fluent candidates. It also just so happens that both Meta and OpenAI have released short-form video products — a move that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman confirmed was motivated by the need for more funding to cover his company’s costly AI projects. And if the pairing of social media and job boards proves profitable for OpenAI and Meta, expect other AI titans to follow suit. 

After all, the White House is on good terms with many of the AI industry’s most prominent leaders, who have the chance to reinforce a friendly political environment via next year’s midterm elections. As companies take advantage of less regulation and accelerate their AI development, job boards may become a valuable lifeline for acquiring the capital to sustain these hefty investments. It’s still too early to tell how this will all play out, but job seekers may wind up using job boards that contribute to the very technology threatening to disrupt the labor market.

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