Brazen Careerist Is Live! Go Check Out The Site.

Published by Ryan Healy on August 26th, 2009 in Work | 0 Comments

As most of you know, Brazen Careerist has been live since March 2008. But, really, we just launched it yesterday. The site has gone from an idea, to a tiny aggregator of 50 Gen Y bloggers, to a network of thousands with social networking features like profiles and groups. And now, we're taking the giant leap to turn the site into a career management tool for next-generation professionals.

You might be thinking, why does Brazen Careerist keep changing what they're doing? My response to that question is, we didn't really have a choice. Over the past six months we've listened to the community and we've listened to the marketplace. And what they both keep telling us is that young professionals (Gen Y) are looking for a professional home on the internet.

On the community side, our groups feature has continued to take off and members now think of Brazen Careerist as a full scale social network. New members are joining every day and engagement on the site is increasing dramatically.

When I read the bios on some of these new profiles, I'm blown away. We have successful entrepreneurs, marketers, freelancers, IT workers, and more. And they're all driven, motivated and accomplished. Our members now think of us as a professional network, and it became glaringly obvious that we had to give them what they wanted.

On the other side, the marketplace needs a young professional social network. Here's why.

Facebook is home base. We all know this. Facebook is where you share your personal information, send messages to established offline friends, and browse through photos from the good ol' days of college. Facebook is not where you meet new people, build a network, and have work related conversations.

Linkedin is the dominant player in the online career network space. It's where you should have a professional profile because it's where your boss and your future boss probably hang out. But the average age on Linkedin is 40, and the profiles emphasize experience – something people in their twenties are a little short on.

When we looked at all of these factors, we realized, there's a huge niche that needs to be filled – a professional network for Gen Y – and our community that started as a little blog aggregator is in the perfect position to fill that niche. So, with this launch, that's what we've done.

First of all, we gave the site a complete facelift, improved the user experience and made just about everything customizable to you – the way a social networking site should be. But most importantly, we completely revamped our profiles to emphasize ideas over experience. The new profiles aggregate everything you say or do on Brazen Careerist. From blog posts to group chatter to profile updates, the new profiles display all of this activity in a feed to show that your experience and background aren't the only indicators of success. Your ideas and potential matter too.

The other part of our profiles showcase standard resume information including work experience and education to give a complete picture of who you are and what you have accomplished – even if it's not 20+ years of experience in a single field.

On a personal note, the past few months have been crazy at the Brazen Careerist office. We've pulled countless all nighters, we've had our fair share of arguments, we've had plenty of great discussions, and Photis, our lead developer even managed to lock himself out of his office an hour before our final load balance test, only to pull a MacGyver and climb through the roof to get to his computer. (This was hilarious, you can see photos here) All in all, it's been everything a pre-launch period is supposed to be and we've all had a great time doing it.

So please, check out the site, create a profile if you don't have one and let us know what you think because community feedback is what made the site what it is today, and it's what will make the site great in the coming months!