Recruitment drives through LinkedIn now face competition as Facebook creates a new job opening feature.

Pages have always been an important part of Facebook's ecosystem, and now they've added a new twist: job listings. Companies who currently market their products via their Facebook news feeds may now also have a new reason to funnel traffic that way; driving traffic for Facebook and paying for the privilege.

At present, it is only an experiment, first spotted by TechCrunch, and part of a wider drive to address the burgeoning social recruitment market. It is, in part, a response to behaviour that Facebook confirm they have already noticed: small businesses offering jobs through their existing Facebook pages.

There are already others participating in this market -- LinkedIn, Work4 and Jobscore to name but a few -- so there is clearly demand to be addressed. These services can already be embedded in Facebook pages, so it is a natural follow-on for Facebook to launch their own service. Speculation online is that Facebook already did some preparation work when it tested Profile Tags in 2015.

Like anything online, the new content has to attract attention away from the other content, and Facebook will apply special formatting to job openings, as well as adding features in the update composer for job related information such as title, salary and hours.

Facebook's own rails will be used to handle applications as Messages, which might backfire if they get mixed in with other items such as support requests.

Of course all this will come at a cost if businesses want the widest reach; however Facebook has the advantage that even people with a LinkedIn account usually appear on Facebook. So, while LinkedIn might get people who are already looking for a job, Facebook could spark interest amongst those who didn't even know they were ready for a change.