Atlanta-based HiddenMarket, which entered public beta on Sunday and announced its launch yesterday, is a social network for professionals that aims to expose the hidden jobs market. 70-80% of job openings are never advertised, they say, because employers prefer to recruit people they know. What's more, they claim that word-of-mouth marketing is the biggest driver of sales leads: they want to bring that online, too. The concept began as AmeriGate Business Network, conceived back in 2003, so in some ways this is a relaunch using a more modern approach.
HiddenMarket users share "intel" - insider knowledge and news about events, business deals and job opportunities. Visitors can rate these leads as "good" or "not good", add comments, bookmark the information, share it with a group, tag it, subscribe to it via RSS and add that user to a list of friends. Groups can be created around clubs, interest areas and locations, with some of these being invite-only. Another feature, "My Lenses", lets you create saved searches that appear in widgets on a Netvibes-type page: you can drag the results around, minimize them and edit the search terms. There are profile pages, too, with a photo, all your activity on the site and your contact info on Skype, Yahoo Messenger and LinkedIn, should you choose to share it. There's also a rating based on how useful your intel was to other users. And once the beta is over, you'll be able to send and manage messages in the "My Messages" section.