With millions of unemployed people out there, many are turning to social networks to assist in finding their next job position. LinkedIn has experienced a surge in traffic as people begin hunting for jobs while Facebook continues to grow, regardless of economic climate. Last night I began brainstorming and realized the potential opportunity for a large Facebook jobs application that tightly integrates into the social graph.

Every day I’ve been getting inquiries from friends who have been laid off or have expiring contracts that will not be renewed. It’s a tough time for many and Facebook has the potential to assist many of those seeking a job through the power of referrals. Theoretically a jobs application could actually reward influencers by paying them for each referred applicant, or rewarding them with successful job placements.

There are some fundamental barriers in building this type of application (the first being the critical mass issue), but there is a lot of potential to build something extremely powerful that transforms the online jobs landscape. Given that the best way for getting a job is through referral, there is a dire need for leveraging the power of the social graph to help those in need of a job, find one.

There are currently a number of jobs applications on Facebook yet none of them have succeeded. Most of those applications have failed to add a new twist to an overly saturated market: the online jobs space. One of those applications, Jobs Indeed, provides users with a listing of jobs from companies where your friends are employed. This is a backwards model though.

The real opportunity lies in leveraging our contacts to help promote job opportunities. If our friends have an incentive to place job listings on their profile, they’ll do so. Job recruiters have already found numerous ways to exploit the information provided by Facebook profiles, and many of those recruiters have gone so far that their accounts have been disabled for spamming users based on their company affiliations.

I believe that we all can be recruiters though and under the current economic climate, I would expect many users to help by placing a Facebook jobs application on their profile. The only remaining thing to figure out is who is building this jobs application and when will it launch?