Y ou can swipe for dates. You can swipe for friends. Now Bumble wants to let you swipe for jobs. The idea is that if you want to expand your network, Bumble is a way to find professional contacts right here, right now. BumbleBIZZ is scheduled to be available in early fall for mobile phones. BumbleBIZZ is the latest step toward transforming Bumble from a dating app into a broader social-networking platform. The company also recently partnered with streaming music service Spotify, allowing users to judge friends or dates based on their music tastes.
Bumble has almost 7 million registered users, or people who actually have created profiles. Unlike LinkedIn, which is increasingly used for long-term network growth and headhunting, BumbleBIZZ is intended to facilitate quick discovery in the business sphere.
Otherwise, the mechanism is the same: users swipe left or right depending on the profiles they see, and like on the dating app, women have to make the first move. Wolfe knows that the women-first feature is likely to be controversial, especially in a business context. But she says the decision to maintain the feature on BumbleBIZZ is about making it easier for women to network, especially with men. Unlike LinkedIn, where invitations can languish for weeks like spam mail, BumbleBIZZ could offer a way to meet a potential business contact during a conference, weekend trip, or even a long layover.
Wolfe says she came up with the idea after she used Bumble to make connections with senior executives at Facebook and Snapchat. Some users might not want to mix fun and business on the same app. Just look at all the people who have gotten fired for posting the wrong thing on Facebook. But Wolfe believes integration is the next step for business networking, and that users will quickly get used to it.
Hyper-locality is where everything is going right now. Besides, Wolfe says, Bumble intends to help users forge meaningful connections in all areas of their life; work is just the logical next step. Write to Charlotte Alter at charlotte. Join Us. Customer Care. Reach Out. Connect with Us. By Charlotte Alter. Fires Show Reality of 1. Home U. All Rights Reserved. TIME may receive compensation for some links to products and services on this website.
