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April 25, 2007

In today's highly connected world, there is a growing number of business-specific social networks that get the close attention of both employers and job seekers. On any given day, millions of Internet users visit the Web sites.

One of these best-known career social network site is LinkedIn. The career Web site reported almost a 90 percent growth rate in its membership over the past 18 months. It has grown from 85,000 members in its first year to over eight million members today.

Now some very large U.S. employers are doing searches on social networking sites to recruit highly qualified candidates that may not be actively job hunting at the current time, but that have previously filed their resumé.

The typical job hunter today isn't only looking at online classifieds, but also is likely to view himself or herself as a brand to be marketed online.

According to a study conducted by SelectMinds, young workers today specifically use business-oriented social networking sites for career development.

For young workers, these Web sites function as a job search engine, providing them with a lot of career information that is pre-qualified by its users and, therefore, credible to them.

Younger workers are more likely to view career networks as beneficial. Overall, about 75 percent of GenYers said they viewed these networks as very important, compared with 66 percent of workers age 30 to 39, and 61 percent of workers age 40 or more.

eMarketer notes that "the proliferation of social networking sites, blogs and online discussion groups organized around niche topics enables employers to find job candidates with specialized knowledge and skills."

eMarketer further notes that the rise of business-specific social networks "does not reduce the importance of job-hunting sites. Besides the general job boards, there are a host of niche sites that specialize by, among other things, industry, geographic region and occupation.

Niche sites such as these are ideal online meeting places where advertisers are looking to target their specific messages."

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Source: eMarketer