Mon, 21 May 2012

Jobs board Monster has integrated BeKnown, its professional networking app on Facebook, into its central job site.

BeKnown, which launched in June 2011, allows jobseekers and candidates to see inside connections at companies they are interested in working with, and then communicate with those individuals.

Employers are able to engage potential recruits through referrals and work to turn fans of the company’s brand on Facebook into potential hires.

Speaking to Recruiter, Monster’s marketing director for UK & Ireland, David Henry, says: “We are most famous for being a job board, but Monster has been really going through an evolution in the years since 2008 to think about what’s coming next.”

He says that a curious feature of social networking is that individuals are “actively openly sharing their personal profile, and they’re not sharing their professional profile”, adding that functions of BeKnown ensure professional and private elements are kept separate, “putting them [users] in charge of their active brand… this really is a case of being able to separate the two”.

He describes that the networking app will create school and colleges pages to allow employers to engage with jobseekers at an earlier stage in their career.

Henry adds that a strength of the app is that it allows people to have a “very human” conversation around “what’s it really like to work at that company?”.