Reference.Me: Look at Your Business Network, Now Look Again!

Reference.me is fairly new business social net… business network build… visual connection we… I’m actually not sure what exactly is, but what is quite sure is that Reference.me wants to be a better way for you to search your professional network while looking for people to hire or find a new job.

Yes, they want to “kill” LinkedIn. The biggest business social network in the world has over 120 million users and if you’re like me, you probably use it to connect to your colleagues, business partners and customers.

While every true business geek does have a LinkedIn profile, few of us use it daily. We might accept or decline someone as a contact, but we stop short of actually using LinkedIn unless we’re actively building our network on a day-to-day basis. Most of us don’t and Reference.me wants to change that…

Connect… Connect…

Reference.me has a really slick interface made up of your “trusted network”, profile and postings. The network is a visually very appealing representation of all your business contacts. Unfortunately, you can’t just add people from other social networks such as LinkedIn – you have to add them hand by hand and hope they might already have a profile of their own on Reference.me.

Reference.me also has a list and profile view with numerous filtering options such as by people’s skills, companies and location. It’s a real pleasure to browse through your network since you can see the layers of your business network and which people are connected to your potential new hires.

Oh you didn’t know? You can use Postings which are essentially just job postings on Reference.me. Each posting asks you to add the position, description, qualification, location and company you’re hiring for. On the other hand, you can also share (repost) other’s postings, suggest someone for a particular posting or just respond to them.

Unfortunately, the big form field that will great you in the Postings tab isn’t search and there’s no way to search Reference.me postings – yet. To impress a your potential new boss, you should edit your profile. You can add all the companies you’ve worked for, your skills and achievements. Once again, the interface looks slick and shiny. Ahhhh.

Looks Awesome – Lets Hope You Use It

There’s just one problem with Reference.me and it’s the same for each and every business social network or tool out there. Will you use it? Reference.me requires you to build your social network once again on a separate service. With Google+ having problems after being the unlucky third to Facebook and Twitter, Reference.me might think about building a tool on top of your and mine LinkedIn networks. Why?

While geeks will open (and probably build) their networks on each and every new services – business is business. I want my potential client to be on the network. Reference.me gives us one of the best tools to explore out networks on the web: now we just need to get the network in there. Try Reference.me out today and try out their nicely designed tools!