Headhunters are using increasingly social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook, Bebo and LinkedIn. LinkedIn, in particular, is focused on business networking but the others, while mainly social in nature, are also being used by recruiters, researchers have found. Some recruiters have set up software that reads a Facebook users' profile, for example, and then displays all the available jobs that are the most suitable to them.
 

Facebook has about 24 million active users across the world and gets 100,000 new registrations a day. MySpace currently has about ten million users.
 

"More formal business sites like LinkedIn have become useful platforms for job seeking and are a useful tool for recruiters to find new candidates," said Satnam Brar, managing director of Maximus, a recruiter that specialises in filling enterprise resource planning roles, which carried out the research (Wikipedia defines ERP as "an attempt to integrate all data and processes of an organisation into a unified system").
 

Ernst & Young now has a Facebook group with in excess of 8,000 members to attract recruits and Accenture has gone as far as opening a virtual office in Second Life, the internet based virtual world, where people communicate with each other using avatars and buy and sell goods and services with a currency that can be exchanged for real money in the real world.