BranchOut Brings Facebook-Focused Professional Networking To Job Search Platform CareerBuilder | TechCrunch
BranchOut, a professional social network for Facebook, is announcing a partnership with jobs and resume site CareerBuilder to help users bring social networking into the job search experience. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Launched in July 2010, BranchOut is sort of like a LinkedIn for Facebook because it allows you to network and find jobs through your friends on the social network. BranchOut’s Facebook app lets you search for companies and then shows you all your friends who either work there or know somebody who does. The application basically unlocks the massive amounts of career data about your social graph on the world’s largest social network.
On average, BranchOut, which is backed by Accel, Norwest, Floodgate, and Redpoint, says a network of 300 Facebook friends translates to 30,000 professional connections. Recruiters, in turn, use BranchOut to promote jobs and source talent from a variety of employment sectors.
Via the partnership, job seekers on CareerBuilder can view jobs of interest and instantly see people in their expanded network, via BranchOut’s application, who they could contact for a potential referral or advice on getting an interview.
The companies say that the integration of BranchOut’s Facebook-focused technology is a perfect fit for job seekers. According to a 2011 CareerBuilder study in the U.S., 40 percent of workers who are looking for jobs said they research companies that interest them on Facebook before applying to a position; and one-in-five (21 percent) use Facebook to contact friends about job opportunities.
And other traditional online job platforms are definitely catching on this social trend when it comes to networking and job search. Fellow job search portal Monster recently recently launched a BranchOut-clone called BeKnown. The question is when LinkedIn will eventually integrate Facebook into its professional social network.