Sometime back I remember seeing an email from Monster about BeKnown. I hadn’t tried it until today when I happened to get another email about it.
What is this? This is an application for Facebook to make it appear/work similar to LinkedIn. So you can use facebook to create your professional profile and recruiters could use it to search profiles. It takes a few clicks to install BeKnown on to your Facebook account. It claims to keep this professional network separate from your friend network. But the rate at which these networks grow, many times I forget their association among my 400 odd connections and am a light facebook user anyway so doesn’t matter to me.
The oppty: I think if Facebook users adopt this application (not sure what’s their incentive since many likely ones to adopt may already use Linkedin), it becomes a way to reach a larger pool of users who are not on LinkedIn (roughly 700 MM Facebook users vs. 200MM on Linkedin).
My experience: I tried it today and haven’t yet filled out my profile fully but seemed easy to do. However my curiosity was to see if this helps Pragna’s recruiting projects. There I have to say, was little disappointed with the search results and the completeness of the profiles. I tried a few searches for technical, manufacturing roles and couldn’t find anyone really.
I am sure recruiters would love the prospect of tapping Facebook. BeKnown is a first such oppty (Branchout was one such app before), but then they have to wait till the network throws up something meaningful :-).