Finally it would seem that one of the major job boards has blinked and properly joined the social recruiting revolution. Monster pre launched a Facebook recruiting network called BeKnown this morning and on first glance it certainly isn’t a token effort. It looks like a very serious play to get into the Facebook recruitment space, a market that has been taking off recently with some interesting successes in terms of both audience growth and client case studies from companies such as Work4labs and dare I say it Branchout.
Monster’s strategy seems to be driven by a desire to capitalise on a differing audience between Facebook and LinkedIn and there is a great blog post here that goes into this in much more detail. This really isn’t surprising, as despite robust denials to the contrary, LinkedIn’s massive growth and significant monetisation of the professional network recruiting market has been a major concern for many job boards.
Inevitably I’m sure today’s launch will see the old arguments about people not wanting to use Facebook to find a new job being reiterated, particularly here in the UK. As I’ve always said though social and professional networks are just platforms and the way people use them varies massively from person to person and in recruitment terms from industry to industry. I’m currently researching Facebook recruitment case studies at the moment and there are enough out there and enough interest from the audience for Monster’s move to be a sensible one.
So is BeKnown any good and will it work? Well on first glance there is a lot I like about it but I’ll do a proper review after I’ve seen Monster on Tuesday to find out more. It is very early days though and it would be churlish to predict any kind of success at this point. Regardless of the eventual outcome though Monster have shown they understand more about social recruiting than I gave them credit for and if I was one of their traditional competitors I’d be watching BeKnown with a great deal of interest!
Interesting. As someone that worked for Monster for some time, what I know is if they do something, they go whole hog, so expect them to really put investment behind this. People that say people wont look for jobs on Facebook are short sited and generally represent companies that are going to loose out from it. Facebooks strategy is to underpin every major industry, and recruitment in a major industry. Looking forward to the full review.
Look forward to seeing this. I am really curious to see if they can make it work!
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can any job board link to be-know or only monster?
I signed up for BeKnown today. I posted the results of job recommendations it created for me. They’re not what I expected: http://bit.ly/kIOpyK
I’m looking forward to reading the following up on this blog after you’ve met with Monster.
Interesting to see that LinkedIn shutting down API access to BeKnown. It would be great Matt to hear your thoughts on this.
What does the Monster do if it grows more than an existing job board?
Know you’ve been mega busy – but interested if there’s a follow up post looming (after your meeting & after LinkedIn turning off a (I’d imagine) fairly significant slice of functionality & appeal of the facility)
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