Facebook’s trying to be all socially-responsible-like and help reduce youth unemployment with a new job search function. Overlooking the fact that it’s US-only at the moment, it’s frankly just an unoriginal, broken, terrible excuse for an app.

The launch of the app was heralded by a Facebook post reading:

“When it comes to economic growth, few issues are more important than matching qualified candidates with great jobs. In that spirit, we know that the power of social media – the connections between friends, family and community – can have an outsized impact on finding jobs.”

All of this is entirely true. Facebook, a massive database of everyone, their employment history, where the work, all that good stuff – would be an amazing tool for connecting well-qualified people to matching jobs. Given this, WHY THE HELL is the promised “Social Jobs Partnership” nothing more than a glorified dumb job search engine? It doesn’t leverage any of the data that Facebook holds on you to try and match you to a job; it’s just a straightforward keyword-based search for jobs, based on the databases of a couple of US job networks.

Now, in case you’re thinking: “Wow – a job site aggregator. That actually sounds kinda handy”, don’t be fooled. When I said it’s a dumb job search engine, I wasn’t lying. It’s completely broken. For example, a search for “builder” (within 100 miles of New York, in the category Building Construction) returned all sorts of completely unrelated results like “Schools Account Administrator” and “Manager, Digital Communications”. I reckon it’s not actually a job search engine, more of a job roulette wheel. Utterly, utterly useless.

It’s such a shame, because there’s such potential. A match between Facebook, which has all the data on the potential employees, and a load of networks that has the data on all the jobs, should be a powerful force to contend with. Instead, it’s a useless and over-hyped piece of crap. Shame. [Wired]