Advantage BeKnown

On September 13, 2011, in HR Technology, HR Trends, HRExaminer, Industry Analysis, Job Boards, by John Sumser

The BeKnown Advantage
It didn’t take long. As of the 12th of September, around the end of the day, BeKnown‘s user count surpassed Branchout‘s. The tally:

  • Beknown:1.379,927
  • Branchout:1,364,341

It’s not much of a surprise.

One of a job board’s primary skills is candidate acquisition. As the company that wrote the book on the subject, Monster is uniquely prepared to build an online network. Whether or not that’s the real future of recruitment advertising is very much a different story.

There are three really difficult things to do in the job board (or related service) business:

  1. Get candidates to visit or join your service
  2. Find employers who are ready and willing to buy your services
  3. Figure out a pricing and value model that keeps both sides happy

Before you count the job boards as dead, dying or out of the picture, remember that the these 3 are the heart of any contemporary recruitment advertising play. Technology is way, way down the list.

The circus is far from over but the old dogs appear to be learning new tricks.

We’re busy working out the kinks of this competition and its meaning for buyers, competitors and other folks interested in the, marketplace. Our Analysis of the the social media landscape in HR and Recruiting will be shipping on October 15.

About the author

John Sumser

John Sumser is the founder, principal author and editor-in-chief of the HRExaminer Online Magazine. John explores the people, technology, ideas and careers of senior leaders in Human Resources and Human Capital. John is the also principal of Two Color Hat where he routinely advises Human Resources, Recruiting Departments and Talent Management teams with product analysis, market segmentation, positioning, strategy and branding guidance.

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  • Raj Singh

    Nice post John. But I think BranchOut’s total user count is higher than BeKnown’s. However, BeKnown’s monthly active users (MAU’s) are higher than BranchOut’s…….and this probably has a lot to do with the makeover of http://www.monster.com (they have the BeKnown brand all over their flagship url). They will probably overtake BranchOut’s total users…..but not yet.

  • http://www.hrexaminer.com John Sumser

    I did a little bit of research into the numbers.

    As far as I can tell, monthly active users is identical to monthly unique visitors. It’s the amount of users that month.

    So, BeKnown just moved ahead of Branchout in terms of monthly users. That’s what I reported. It’s a big accomplishment that I wasn’t expecting to see.
    It occurs to me that there’s probably another statistic. It might be the rough equivalent of the number of resumes in the resume database. I’m not sure what the language is but I’d guess that Branchout has more of those than BeKnown. Profiles, I’d bet.

    Another interesting set of numbers would involve the average size of member networks and the number of jobs searched/evaluated per member. The history of those numbers would be important and fascinating.

    The point of the article, which is based on publicly reported numbers, is that BeKnown was abe to catch Branchout in a relatively short time. This is because they are really good at things that Branchout still has to learn. Branchout is agile in ways that BeKnown will have some trouble with.

    It would be great to have a transparent process in which it was possible to really compare apples to apples across the board.

    I’ll see what I can do about digging deeper into the details.

  • Pingback: Enemy Of My Enemy Is My Friend? CareerBuilder & BranchOut to Take On Monster’s BeKnown

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