Week 5 EOC: Social Networks and Job Hunting

Building Trust, but Not Value

 Late Saturday, employment website Monster.com launched a professional networking app on Facebook called BeKnown. Users can import work history details from Facebook, LinkedIn, and Monster.com, connect with contacts from these sites, Twitter, or their email, and browse jobs posted by these and their second degree connections.
However, BeKnown does not let recruiters search for job candidates by parameters such as qualifications or work history unless they’re already connected to them. This significantly reduces the service’s value to recruiters, which in turn reduces the value of maintaining a profile on the app to users, as there’s little chance of being passively recruited.
Users may therefore be better off joining a more populated professional network such as LinkedIn or BranchOut, or browsing job boards than having to rebuild their graph on BeKnown.

Brand Ambassadors: Employing Real Customers to Get Out the Word on  Understanding Consumer and Business Buyer Behavior. (Fundamentals of Marketing; Chapter 5 page 143)

The major missing functionality of BeKnown is actually a conscious choice by Monster. The company has decided not to currently allow recruiters to search the profiles of all the app’s users for people who meet the criteria for certain jobs. This is ability is both crucial to recruiters who need to find candidates outside their network, and to users who want to be eligible for discovery based on their skills by recruiters they’re not connected to. Without this feature, users may as well just browse Monster.com.

"Matt Mund, Monster.com's vice president of product management, acknowledged that Facebook as a recruiting platform is growing rapidly. The company, which hosts a job board and other recruiter services, launched its own Facebook app, dubbed BeKnown, in June, and the application now has nearly 800,000 monthly users,according to AppData.com, a market research group. Over the next couple of weeks, the company plans to launch a program where companies can offer employees cash rewards for making referrals through the app."(Job Recruiters Turn to Facebook to Find Candidates -Copyright 2011 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved)

  If the creators of BeKnown, truly want to become leaders in the job hunting market, in this high unemployment era, they may want to reconsider their parameters of job searching and qualifying applicants.  Why not have a search engine that acts like a head hunter? Maybe monster will pick up the proverbial dropped ball.

Source: Job Recruiters Turn to Facebook to Find Candidates - WSJ
http://www.insidefacebook.com/2011/06/27/monster-beknown/