Facebook vs. LinkedIn: the social media mullet metaphor. It used to be Facebook "party" in the front, LinkedIn "business" in the back.
But in the past few months, a new Facebook app has been challenging the recruiting power — and professional clout — of LinkedIn. BranchOut, a "professional social network" for Facebook just landed $25 million in Series C Funding.
What does that mean? If you remember from the early days of Facebook (and I do), the burgeoning website went through several rounds of interested investors—none the which could charm young CEO Mark Zuckerberg to franchise his exclusive college networking brand (Facebook used to only allow college e-mail addresses to register to the site).
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BranchOut is going through the same thing, now hitting "Series C" in the rounds of preferred stock issued to investors…which generally means there's more and more confidence that this capital venture will be successful.
Here's the grab. In a TechCrunch interview, CEO Rick Marini says his professional network will be for the rest of us—those who start on the bottom tier of the ladder and may be looking to climb to the top. Marini tells TechCrunch:
"LinkedIn is a great company, and I think they do a really good job of addressing the 10 percent of the global workforce that are white-collar executives. And we, of course, address that market as well. But if you think about the other 90 percent, these are the people on Facebook. So it's anywhere from a recent college grad, maybe returning military [personnel], cashiers, customer service, all the way up to accountants, software engineers and CEOs. All of those people are on Facebook, and what we've done is finally given all of those people a professional identity for the first time."
As any benefits manager will tell you, recruiting is where you begin in human resources. So, much like the infancy of LinkedIn, you'll be begin to hear more about RecruiterConnect, a Facebook tool for recruiters and hiring managers.
But RecruiterConnect has some stiff competition. According to Job Board Doctor, more than 92 percent of responding HR and recruiting professionals use LinkedIn as a recruitment platform. What's more, Forbes reports , revenues in the website's recruiting services surged 136 percent to $84.9 Million, "making the company the fastest growing public provider of corporate recruiting solutions."
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