The popularity of social networking sites shows no sign of receding, and business networking sites such as LinkedIn.com have established the Internet as a way to shake hands electronically with new contacts. Such is the hype around Web 2.0 that more and more specialist sites are springing up. So could tapping into an online community help you to find your next job?

The website i-resign.com started nine years ago as a hobby, a place to post jokes and famous resignation letters. It now serves about 15 million page impressions a year and has some seriously useful content for jobseekers. Registered members who intend to leave their job, post the details of the role, relevant contacts and the date that they are going to quit.

“Everybody knows about the regular job boards, but there is a whole market of hidden, unadvertised jobs and we think that posting these resignations is complementary to official job boards and classifieds,” says Kauser Kanji, the website’s general manager.

“People post their job up because they know that they are probably going to help someone else to find a job,” he says. “It all sounds very altruistic, but I think that’s the way it works. We don’t entirely understand it because we don’t incentivise or pay anybody to post their job up, but we get some 6,000 people a month telling us (that they are leaving their jobs).”

Laura who works for one of the Big Four accountancy and professional services firms, has signed up as a “mole” with TheCareerMole.com. The website seeks to market personal referrals by putting jobseekers in touch with moles within a firm where they would like to work. The job hunter gains inside information about a particular company and the mole gets a financial bonus for a successful hire under their company’s referral bonus scheme.

“It’s quite good to have a big say in who you might be working with,” says Laura, who wishes to remain anonymous. While she is yet to refer a prospective colleague, she has no qualms about doing so in the future. After reading a candidate’s CV, she envisages e-mailing them to build up a rapport and then allowing her firm to vet the person through the traditional hiring process. “You can get a good idea of what someone is like by e-mail,” she says.

It’s a win-win for both parties, according to the website’s co-founder, Kristian Hall. “Employers can reduce recruitment costs and improve employee retention by getting referrals from people they trust — the best possible filter. Employees, or moles, will be rewarded for referring quality candidates as well as gaining kudos from the boss for engaging in recruitment.”

And how do employers feel about social networking sites? The professional services firm Deloitte has a number of moles listed on TheCareerMole, says Sarah Shillingford, its graduate recruitment partner. But she says that the firm would not pay a referral bonus for a hire made in this way. Deloitte is also using the social networking site Facebook.com to put students in touch with others who have taken part in the company’s scholarship or internship programme. It is not alone: the mobile communications firm T-Mobile has invited its new graduate intake to join a dedicated group on Facebook to “meet” each other.

It’s slightly different from websites such as TheCareerMole, says Shillingford. The firm prefers employees to get involved in recruitment activities formally organised by the company or by recommending friends or family, rather than setting up their own recruitment network. “(It’s) not something we want employees spending their time doing, especially when they should be doing client work,” she says.