LinkedIn is under fire by Facebook and could be overtaken by two start-ups as early as mid 2012....

Attachment 105Professionals in the acquisition industry have recognised LinkedIn as one major force in the corporate recruiting market, not in the least because its growth has dramatically impacted many of the big players in this market. Many of the larger executive recruitment firms like Heidrick and Struggles, Korn Ferry, and Spencer Stuart saw the value of their proprietary executive networks eroding by LinkedIn.

Large job boards like Monster.com, The Ladders and others saw job seekers (and recruiters) move their dollars and energy increasingly toward LinkedIn, mainly because people in the LinkedIn network maintain their profile actively, giving recruiters a real-time, highly accurate database from which to search and contact candidates.

LinkedIn’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 network has around 100 million users and is growing at a rate of nearly 3 million per month, thereby continuing to transform and very much unhinge the US$120 billion corporate recruiting industry, primarily because its system is such a powerful tool for recruiters to find passive candidates.

Now, some recruiters say they have all but eliminated their spending on job boards, which can charge a few hundred dollars per job posting, depending on volume.
Not surprisingly, mid-sized recruiting companies are now seeing big companies develop more and more expertise in the use of social networking internally.

Social Networks As Powerful Recruiting and Job Seeking Tools

If anything, LinkedIn’s track record and financials show that social networks are powerful recruiting and job seeking tools. It explains why its network grew to such monumental proportions. But if we care to believe some of the world’s experts on social media, executive recruitment and business trends, LinkedIn’s hegemony as the world’s largest “professional social network” may soon come to an end.

Facebook Versus LinkedIn

Over recent years, LinkedIn made job boards worried, and for good reason. But it now draws considerable fire from Facebook. Looking at the most basic of metrics explains why.

By approximation, LinkedIn has 120 million members whereas Facebook has 750 million. Compared to LinkedIn, Facebook engages broader audiences who use the network to 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.

LinkedIn is a "professional social network" which is used for business networking, recruiting, and the promotion of our professional expertise and experience. As such, LinkedIn requires a different set of features and security than Facebook offers today.

By implication, while all the growth LinkedIn enjoyed since its inception is wonderful for LinkedIn’s investors and most corporate recruiters, there is an entire world of Facebook users who do not use LinkedIn – or not yet. Employers understand this, as well as the concept of “fishing where the fish are”.

When it comes to social marketing, Facebook is cornering LinkedIn at rapid pace. And unless LinkedIn comes us with a cornering strategy it’s not unlikely that it will receive a coup‘d grace from Facebook within the next twelve to twenty-four months.

The perception that Facebook is made up of flaky teenagers while LinkedIn includes only business professionals is wrong. The two sites’ average ages are just two years apart (38 for Facebook, 40 for LinkedIn). So there are plenty of 30-somethings on Facebook with years of work experience who are considering a career change.

A major part of job searching involves personal references and word of mouth. Facebook is designed for just such interactions, as its “Recommended Pages” on a user’s home page shows. Facebook has more people, spending more time on the site, using innovative technology and getting personal referrals.

While LinkedIn contains a more comprehensive résumé database, candidates tend to value referrals from their connections on Facebook more.

And because of the way Facebook works, the information they share is not “sanitized” or “edited” for business purposes. This sort of peer-to-peer marketing, effective in virtually every other field, will be impossible to duplicate on LinkedIn.

Facebook's use as a job-recruitment tool remains small, but its appeal may be growing. But that percentage may change very soon. The first professional networking application in Facebook was BranchOut.

BranchOut Versus BeKnown

BranchOut, founded by former SuperFan CEO Rick Marini, is a similar application with 2.7 million monthly users, overlays employer information on top of the Facebook interface while shielding personal data (like embarrassing photos) from recruiters’ eyes. But even this network’s success is now meeting considerable competition from yet another start-up, Monster.com’s BeKnown.

Monster.com is one of the biggest and most experienced players in the corporate recruiting market. The company operates a vast array of websites, advertising services, and media tools to help job seekers and recruiters with more than 49 million unique visitors globally.

The company generates over US$1 Billion in revenue and has continued to grow over the last few years - but has seen its business slow because of the growth in social networks, vertical job boards, and job aggregators like Indeed.com.

But despite the company’s continued growth internationally and investments in search and advertising, Monster has been fighting an inexorable trend toward social networks – which ultimately become the magnet for recruiters.

Corporate recruiters go where the people are so they have shifted their spending away from Monster.com advertising and are spending more money on LinkedIn, Facebook, and their own employment branding strategies. Not surprisingly, Monster’s team has a deep understanding of the recruiting industry and understand these trends.

BeKnown: Professional Social Networking for Facebook

To keep tapping corporate recruiter’s advertising revenue and new service revenues that’s increasingly moving toward LinkedIn and Facebook, Monster launched BeKnown in June 2011, a new Facebook application that hopes to become the professional social network for Facebook users and a vital new tool for recruiters, human resources, and talent acquisition teams.

Instead of joining forces with LinkedIn, Monster aims to attract the 600 million-plus users worldwide who aren’t LinkedIn members. Monster chose to bypass the professional site and ally itself with Facebook to let the 700 million users of the popular Facebook social community build a professional network there. BeKnown mimics and extends many of the features of LinkedIn within the Facebook network, many of which extend beyond where LinkedIn is today.

The Know-How Of A Talent Acquisition Company

Since Monster is a talent acquisition company, the system has some unique features to help people find jobs and to help small and mid-sized businesses recruit people. With BeKnown, Monster essentially turns Facebook into a recruiting platform by borrowing liberally from LinkedIn and BranchOut but by offering more versatility and flair than either.

Monster has added enough bells and whistles to appeal to younger users accustomed to interacting more intimately and frequently. It’s not a frontal attack on LinkedIn’s growing recruitment business, but a flanking manoeuvre, focusing on younger workers just beginning to build their business contacts.

BeKnown – A Second Facebook Profile

The visual appearance of BeKnown mimics the typical Facebook presence and gives users essentially a second Facebook profile. This means that users can immediately build a professional profile from their Facebook profile and by importing information straight from LinkedIn or Monster but can give it a different photo and different information.

Users can continue to manage pictures and other existing Facebook content to create a distinctly differently persona from the one social friends get to see. By doing this, users instantly leverage their Facebook friends and connections. BeKnown even gives users the ability to invite connections from their Twitter and LinkedIn networks, and from their Gmail, Yahoo, and other email systems. This has already proven to be a major improvement to the Facebook platform.

That BeKnow offers features other networks seem to miss may explain why the application already had 760,000 active monthly users just after two months after its launch. The system is well designed, easy to use, and provides value in many new ways.

It is user friendly, will offer support in 19 languages and offers users the ability to follow companies and view jobs from those companies, which are matched against their BeKnown and Monster.com profiles.

Users can create "badges" – borrowed from social gaming and signify professional achievements – by getting a degree, completing a certification, recommending friends, creating a large number of connections, and performing other tasks which are either difficult or unique. Monster expects to expand the badging concept in many ways as the network grows.

The Jobs System is very powerful and easy to use. A user can apply for a job in a single click, and information from the BeKnown network is automatically submitted. The system proactively displays jobs which are recommended by friends and the system. Similar to Jobvite and Jobmagic, friends can recommend jobs, which will show up on your site. (Jobs from Monster.com are also tucked onto the jobs tab.)

BeKnown - Breaking LinkedIn’s Endorsement Concept

BeKnown aims to break LinkedIn’s endorsement concept, which many recruiters consider unreliable simply because negative endorsements are never given. Instead, the application adds a feature to let people endorse other people's competencies, skills and capabilities and how the endorser worked with the job candidate, which may make endorsements more powerful.

Once an endorsement or badge is attached to a person, the new information appears on their Facebook Wall.

BeKnown extends Facebook with features to make recruiting far easier. Monster has extended the concept of “job pages” to let anyone who “claims” a company profile to post jobs for free to their BeKnown network (yes, Free!) and then customize the company page to build a corporate brand.

Recruiters, who, obviously, can create their own BeKnown profiles, can also claim company pages where, once they’ve built a network, can post jobs for free. This could mean that BeKnown quickly starts housing a large number of jobs. Monster.com job listings are also integrated into the system, so users immediately see many jobs when they click the "jobs" button. Job seekers already considered this a major feature – it makes it very easy for them to see a customized feed of jobs they are interested in every time they login.

Can Monster make a success of BeKnown?

If Monster can market the service well and build a strong groundswell of users, BeKnown has the potential to become a significant new player in the world of social recruiting.

Because BeKnown is brand new the system still is unproven in the market.

Nonetheless, many speculate that the system has the potential to become one of the major social recruiting networks in the marketplace within the next 24 months. To make it so it is likely that Monster will focus its extensive marketing efforts at the Facebook audience, hoping to rapidly establish BeKnown as people’s “professional networking” application among Facebook’s 750 million strong worldwide usergroup as well as for its own network of 22 million annual visitors.

Monster is an innovative company and understands the need for proactive and aggressive marketing - so watch for a lot of advertising and noise about this new offering.

As powerful as LinkedIn is today, it is a more “button down shirt” environment than Facebook and thus the BeKnown application - so naturally appeals to people with more senior positions and often coming from an older demographic. What may be one of LinkedIn’s killers is that BranchOut and BeKnown already demonstrated that millions of job seekers don’t want to leave their favourite website when looking for work and, unfortunately, LinkedIn doesn’t rank as high in those stakes as both start-ups do.

And what is Facebook’s relationship with this new application? None. This is not a Facebook-endorsed service: Monster is going alone here – leveraging the Facebook network to build a new community and service of its own. If it takes off (as I believe it will), Facebook might see it as competitive to its own advertising business – or might look to replicate the functionality itself.

The ultimate test will be how fast the network grows but predictions are that if current growth trends continue, Facebook could rival traditional job boards already in 2012. And whether it likes it or not, LinkedIn has only its reputation and clean-bordering on empty-interface.

If it doesn’t want to be destroyed by Facebook in the next coming years it will have to come up with some very cunning plans to secure its survival. Failing that, it’s likely that Facebook will obliterate LinkedIn even before 2013.

Predictions are that LinkedIn is looking at a few tough years ahead….

Ideas, Comments and Suggestions?

Attachment 104If you have ideas, comments, questions or suggestions on how Social Media could or should help you find new job opportunities, may I invite you to post your feedback in the Social Networks & Employment – Where Will Your Next Job Opportunity Come From? forum?

Chances are that, over time, you may learn more about how to play the online recruitment game more successfully.

Before you can do so ensure you complete this free-of-charge process to personalise your posts. I'd love to hear your opinions!

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