World’s Largest Professional Search Engine Set To Take On LinkedIn

Identified, the world’s largest professional search engine, is now available for public use through open beta. A finalized version of the platform is set for launch after additional tools and features are added. Identified aims to compete with LinkedIn as the go-to resource for professional networking and job seeking.

Leveraging Facebook’s massive user base to bring together millions of recruiters and job seekers, the latest professional hangout evokes comparisons to similar career networks  such as Branchout, Beknown, and Talent.me. But Identified offers more than just another profile page built on top of the social networking giant.  Using measurements reminiscent of Klout, and their social media influence scale, Identified ranks each user profile with a score between 0 and 100, in hopes of matching together more qualified candidates with companies. Identified takes a user’s network, education history, and work experience, and combines the three elements into a total score that can be compared and ranked within search results – allowing recruiters and hiring managers to uncover the most relevant talent.

“We began Identified as a recruiting site to connect job applicants with companies, but saw the power in providing search results based on people’s online networks — not just the standard metrics of education and work experience,” said Brendan Wallace, Co-Founder of Identified in a recent press release. “Nobody had ever attempted to quantify the value of a person’s online network. We saw that companies cared as much about a person’s network as they did about their education and work experience. So we built Identified to show people how they appear to world based not only on what they know, but who they know.”

However, a recent article in Forbes ponders the effectiveness of such a specific system – Will users reject their personal score if it’s too low? Can years of work experience really translate into a simple number? Does education – and the size and scope of an individual’s network  – really make one candidate better than the other? Wallace notes that scores are broken into various categories and that their data algorithms take into account a comprehensive set of factors when assigning numbers, Additionally, he says, more features are on the way to address specific background scenarios that might impact an individual’s ranking.

Fears aside, hundreds of companies have already adopted the platform to find top talent. Identified has scored and indexed over 40 million professionals, 60,000 companies and 8,000 universities, with their database numbers rapidly expanding.

“What Facebook has built for the social graph, Identified is building for the professional graph,” commented Adeyemi Ajao, Identified Co-Founder. “Identified is making the connections in the professional world more accessible, meaningful and relevant using the power of social data.”