Cheezhead

Of all the new niche job sites popping up in the employment landscape, WhosCreative.com sounds like one of the more promising ventures.

It’s not just another social network with job posting capabilities. Creative professionals, including art directors, photographers, illustrators, and animators, can upload their work into their own online portfolio directory, which can be searched by companies around the world.

Five pieces can be uploaded for free, and for about $8 a month, the user can add as many pieces as he likes. They can also customize their portfolio by adding a resume, audio and video, and a personalized domain name. To track eyeballs, WhosCreative gives their users a Google Analytics feature so they know who is viewing the site and how many hits it has received.

“We give creative professionals the tools they need to keep the freshest work online as possible,” founder Jon Lewis, a recruiter for ICA Creative, said. “It’s a great way for them to showcase their work and put themselves out there where clients can find them.”

Ron Sabatini, Motion Graphic Designer and Art Director for Ogilvy and a recent WhosCreative.com client, said, “The organization of the projects and files were easily discernible and the file descriptions helped them differentiate the many versions they were dealing with. Security is always an issue, so [the staff at Ogilvy] appreciated the fact that they didn’t have to worry about that on the WhosCreative site.”

The site offers their clients an extranet, a password-protected area where companies can view works-in-progress. Lewis said the intention was to allow companies to not only search resumes, but creative content as well.

And of course there is the ever-present social networking site, which encourages creative professionals to message each other and comment on their work. To really build out this portion, WhosCreative might look to competitor Renderosity.com, around for 10 years now, which serves their artistic community on a larger scale by offering tutorials and a marketplace where artists can actually sell their work.

In terms of traffic, WhosCreative has a ways to go before catching up with Coroflot, another competitor who has 104,000 profiles on the site, and about 800 jobs. Currently WC only has about 21 jobs posted.

One concern is that because of the presence of a lot of DIY software for Web design, creatives would rather build their own site to really showcase their skills. But I do think that the addition of the social network will stir up some healthy competition that could become a hunting ground for companies.