What does launching of BeKnown mean to recruiters?

1. Larger and younger market. As most people in the talent acquisition industry know, LinkedIn
has become a major force in the corporate recruiting market. The
company’s stellar IPO and rapid growth as “the professional social
network” has created a transformational platform for corporate
recruiters and job seekers.  Corporate recruiting is LinkedIn’s fastest
growing revenue stream, and the company is now aggressively building new
tools and services.  Today the LinkedIn network has around 100 million
users and is growing at a rate of nearly 3 million per month.

Facebook reportedly has over 700
million users and many of the users are not on LinkedIn yet. Facebook
users keep in touch with friends, play games, share photos and family
news, publish personal information, and often promote information about
their children, pets, and local activities.  They even publish their
location. And as the data below shows, they tend to be younger, of a
lower household income, and of a slightly lower education level. And
because of the way Facebook works, the information they share is not
“sanitized” or “edited” for business purposes.

The following chart reveals the demographic differences between these networks. 
 
Fig 1:  Facebook vs. LinkedIn vs. Monster Networks (Comscore March, 2011)

So despite the LinkedIn’s rapid
growth, there is a huge pool of young professionals on Facebook, who do
not take an advantage of professional social networking. BeKnown has the
potential to bring a professional social networking to this large
Facebook audience without mixing the professional and social identities.
Also, as we can see from the chart, Monster’s client base is very
similar to the Facebook’s, which makes the Facebook platform an ideal
place for launching BeKnown.

2. The Use of Social Networks for Corporate Recruiting.
It turns out, as the LinkedIn financials show, that social networks are
powerful recruiting and job seeking tools. The $120 billion corporate
recruiting industry is being transformed (and upset) by LinkedIn because
the system is such a powerful tool for recruiters to find passive
candidates.  People in the LinkedIn network maintain their profile
actively, giving recruiters a real-time, highly accurate database from
which to search and contact candidates. Recruiting companies are losing
the value of their networks. Large job boards like Monster.com,
CareerBuilder, The Ladders, and others are seeing job seekers (and
recruiters) move their dollars and energy toward LinkedIn. The launch of
BeKnown is a major move to change these dynamics and give Monster a
significant opportunity to play in the Facebook network of job seekers
and recruitment needs.

3. BeKnown – professional social network on Facebook.
BeKnown will appear as an application on Facebook, but after you join
and create an account you begin managing your professional network
outside of Facebook. Your professional network isn’t limited to your 
Facebook friends. In fact, your Facebook friends are not being revealed
on BeKnown.

Some other key features include:

• The ability to invite connections from both Facebook and your LinkedIn network, Gmail, Yahoo, and other email systems;
• The ability to share different information and photos professionally than you do in Facebook today (a major important feature);
• The ability to claim and manage company profiles;
• The ability to post and share jobs;
• The ability to earn “badges,” which
  are professional achievements (a form of game rewards) for having the
  most number of connections, a large number of connections at the
  executive level, helping and endorsing others, etc.;
• The ability to give references and focus these recommendations based on a friend’s competencies or capabilities;
• The ability to follow companies and
  view jobs from those companies, which are matched against your BeKnown
  profile (and your Monster.com profile);
• Support for 19 languages.

4. Jobs. Since
Monster is a talent acquisition company, the system has some unique
features to help businesses recruit people.  It will proactively display
your jobs which can be recommended by the potential employee’s friends
(creating a “JobVite”-like referral network).  This is a significant
opportunity for job seekers – making it very easy for them to see a
customized feed of jobs that fits their interests every time they log
on. Monster is giving the ability for the recruiters to post a fee for
referrals and reward users who brought the person to the job. BeKnown is
also free to recruiters. Monster jobs are incorporated there, so any
user will see a good amount of jobs beginning on day one.

The BeKnown system has the ability to
become a major force in the professional social networking. BeKnown
extends Facebook with features to make recruiting far easier. 
Recruiters can easily set up company pages, post jobs, create referral
networks, and leverage existing Monster job listings among the BeKnown
network.  The system’s features for badging, job sharing, job referrals,
and company pages should quickly create a “market for jobs” which
builds upon Facebook’s reach, but bypasses Facebook’s more generalized
advertising system.