LinkedIn may be viewed as the premier professional-networking service, but ask any recent college graduate if they use it and you’re liable to get a blank stare.
Meanwhile, these same young job seekers who’ve been using Facebook since high school and likely have over a 1,000 friends on that social network — some of whom they might not have spoken to since 12th-grade calculus — are in need of the same career networking tools.
These are exactly the kind of people who would benefit the most from BranchOut, a brand new app that lets you use your Facebook friends to find a job.
Once you download the app, BranchOut organizes your contacts by where they work, revealing the people you already know that are at the companies you’re targeting to send out a resumé.
After your friends install the app, you can see how many people they know at various companies. You can’t see who they know; as with traditional networking, you’ll have to ask your friend to make an introduction.
And unlike LinkedIn, BranchOut doesn’t enable you to network with complete strangers.
Right now BranchOut is completely free. But in a month or so, users will have to pay a fee similar to LinkedIn’s $195 to post a job on BranchOut’s nascent job board that everyone using the app can see.
You can already post a job for free that’s only viewable by people in your direct network. BranchOut also hopes to make its app accessible to people in non-English-speaking countries in the next two to three months.
Since BranchOut just launched in July, it is still working out a few bugs, like displaying people’s past employers as their current ones, and the company is working to establish a distinction between those two types of career connections.
But BranchOut’s biggest drawback comes from the Facebook culture itself.
Facebook’s informality does not request people to provide their work information or present it in any type of consistent manner.
So, you might have friends at a certain company without knowing it. But if you get in touch with them, your longstanding relationship should enable you to get the information you need.
Ultimately, BranchOut combines job searching with networking on an intuitive platform with tools that the youngest members of the business world are particularly familiar with in a vernacular which is their own.