Monster, the largest job search engine in the world according to Wikipedia, recently launched BeKnown, a professional networking application for Facebook. Like the application BranchOut, another professional networking app on Facebook by a company with the same name, BeKnown will sit on the Facebook platform.
According to the Facebook page for BeKnown, the application will help you with the following:
- BeKnown makes it easy to expand your professional network with colleagues and friends—right here on Facebook.
- Plus, BeKnown keeps your professional connections separate from your Facebook friends (so you don’t have to worry about your boss seeing the photos you posted on Facebook of your crazy weekend in Vegas).
- Earn badges. Get skill endorsements. Search companies and find jobs through your network. You can even help your friends find jobs. With BeKnown, now you can manage your professional network without ever leaving Facebook!
Monster is quite late to the game of professional networking, seeing as BranchOut already has more than 700,000 users using the application. There are other applications besides BranchOut. However, BranchOut seems to be the most prominent at this time. For a company like Monster – a pioneer in its field, it was was the first public job search on the Internet having the first public resume database in the world and the first to have job search agents or job alerts, to create an application for Facebook can be seen as an acknowledgement that the recruitment world, the game is changing.
At the time of writing this article BeKnown already had 45,922 fans on its Facebook page and over 90 reviews with an overall 3.9 out 5 rating which is very good. Given that it’s only been a few days since the application was launched, this is very impressive. Things happen very quickly in the social media world. A random sampling of comments showed that some users were very happy with the application while others were experiencing teething problems.
Monster has a few factors in its favour with its late start. Being late to the game can sometimes be an advantage especially in the Firstly it is a strong and readily recognisable brand technology industry where companies sometimes spend lots of capital on research and development before they strike gold with a winning concept or invention. The first to the party is not always the winner. MySpace, Palm and several other companies can testify to this.
Another factor going for it is that by taking it’s time to get an application for Facebook, it does not have to start from scratch. Monster has some serious volumes on the database with over a million job postings at any time and over 150 million resumes in the database (2008) and over 63 million job seekers per month according to Wikipedia. The company employs approximately 5,000 employees in 36 countries and with such a presence already, pushing out the new application will not be too difficult.
BeKnown has incorporated some of the great features from current professional networking sites with the aim of providing a better experience. These features include the ability to get endorsements, professional network statistics, inviting connections from other social networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn as well as contacts from Gmail. Some of the other networks might have taken time to come up with all these features but with BeKnown, they are introduced in one go. Reading through all the features of BeKnown, it seems like a hybrid of LinkedIn and BranchOut with features from other social networks.
The professional networking app space promises to be very competitive and very interesting. Watch this space.
