StartupTunes

BranchOut

There were quite a few career enhancing and recruiting websites back in the early internet days. Along came LinkedIn and started to connect people professionally and by the time they were done with their experiments, they had attracted recruiters and companies to post job openings on their website. The only problem was that it took them nearly 4 years to get all these features off the ground.

BranchOut is similar yet smarter. It leverages the existing Facebook user base as your potential network connections.  A simple signup via a Facebook is good enough to have a basic profile ready for users to start a job hunt, change career path or simply browse through their friend network to see what they are upto; professionally of course.

Setting up a profile is easy, as most of the information is gathered directly from your Facebook profile. I tried resume upload facility first and then quickly undone. I would recommend that it is better to copy a few things from there rather than import them directly as you would end up editing most of it anyway.

I did a search for jobs in an area and found over 600 results. This was rather unusual since I had done a search against the same criteria on two very famous recruiting websites. The navigation bar on top is done well and provides direct access to messages, notifications, people, companies, jobs etc. There is also an endorsement feature which the site recommends, however, I would advise against it if you are secretly looking for a job as it posts a general request straight to your wall.

As in most cases, some annoyances are to be expected, for instance, it remembers my professional title in the job search but forgets my desired location; every time! I think this is a no brainier since a person’s current city is listed in the profile and if the application cannot remember the user’s past preference then it should use their city by default instead of the United States.

Other annoyances are mostly privacy concerns and the need for this app to post everything on my wall. Thankfully it asks and there is an option to cancel or ignore it.

Branch Out seems basic at the moment and has far to go and is nowhere in the same class as LinkedIn, however it has the potential and users should try it out if only to get an idea where job options are.