BranchOut brings career networking onto Facebook. Facebook isn’t all party pics and FarmVille, some of us do serious career networking on the site. BranchOut caters to the professionally oriented Facebook user. This relatively new application transforms Facebook into your personal career center. You can search through your friends by company to see which social connections can help you professionally, too.You can use the app to discover new contacts and business opportunities on Facebook, as well. There’s a friends-of-friends feature that will help you find connections at specific companies you’re interested in, and you can use the app to post and find job openings.
All in all, BranchOut is useful enough that we wonder why Facebook isn’t doing more internally on the career and job-search end. Here’s a brief demo video.The big question most would ask about this app is obvious: Why would you use a Facebook app when LinkedIn already exists to cover the same space of social/professional networking? And isn’t it risky to build your business on a pure-play app atop someone else’s platform?
LinkedIn has quite a few challengers these days, but none have the momentum or userbase of Facebook. Yet Facebook itself isn’t a direct competitor. We think building a career networking app on top of Facebook’s social network is actually brilliant because it taps into very real and vibrant connections within a social graph, not just the sometimes-stale professional Rolodex stored in a LinkedIn profile.
Facebook is also a network that many users check into every day, so if you’re job-hunting or trying to connect with specific people, your chances might be better than on other career sites, where the folks who check in daily are more likely to be other job seekers than your desired contacts.
As for the pure-play aspect, in most cases, we’d be extremely cautious and not so optimistic. In the event that Facebook decides to devote serious time and effort to career networking and job-search features, BranchOut’s goose may be cooked. But for the time being, there could be some interesting, creative and potentially lucrative things coming out of this startup.
And apparently we’re not the only ones who see promise in the BranchOut model; the startup, which just launched in July, has raised a healthy $6 million dollar Series A from Silicon Valley venture capital firm Accel Partners. What do you think of BranchOut? Do you or have you ever used Facebook to find a job, help someone else get a job or do general professional networking?
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