Everyone you know is on Facebook, and most people have added their resume information. But you can’t search by companies and even searching within your friends for company names is virtually impossible. So if you want to research which of your friends work at a specific company, or which friends of friends do, you head on over to LinkedIn.
Well, not anymore.
BranchOut launched this evening, a new Facebook application that makes career networking a snap. The application unlocks massive amounts of career data about my friends and friends of friends that was just impossible to get to before.
Search on a company name and see which of your Facebook friends work there (or used to). If those friends have installed the app, you can also see how many of their friends have worked at that company. You can then reach out to them for an introduction if you like.
My network of 5,000 friends have worked at 4,664 unique companies. My 20,607 friends of friends have worked at 17,901 unique companies. Basically, someone I know or someone that they know works at any place I want access to.
BranchOut tells me that 5 of my friends worked at Sun. 68 worked at Microsoft, and 53 worked at Google. I also have three friends who were in the Navy, apparently.
The application also has job listings, currently free for thirty days to your direct network. Soon, says founder and CEO Rick Marini, they’ll let people put up job postings that reach all users, for $30/month. Given who’ll be using this, that should be a no brainer. We’ll certainly list TechCrunch jobs there.
Test it out and let us know what you think. It’s just out of beta and there are a few bugs, so go easy. Or not.