Emerging Leaders Allow Themselves to be Found

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Emerging Leaders Allow Themselves to be Found

You know that Facebook is for fun. Tweets have a short shelf life in promoting someone or something. So if you're serious about being found and matched to your ideal job, the social network site of importance is LinkedIn.

In today's talent management marketplace an invitation to "join my professional network" has become more obligatory than swapping business cards with people you know and respect. The reason is if you try to hard using social networks to get executive recruiters' attention, you'll turn them off. However, if someone else recommends you, that's not the case. As an executive and business coach who works with leaders and emerging leaders, recruiters often send me their job specs asking if I know someone who would be a good fit.

More than 60 million members have logged on to LinkedIn to create profiles, upload their employment histories and build connections with people they know. You can also connect your online professional interactions in one place, join groups on the site (LinkedIn has more than 500,000 of them, based on companies, schools, etc.), offer advice and link your Twitter account and blog updates to your profile.

Visitors to the LinkedIn site have jumped 31% from last year to 17.6 million in February. They include your customers, your colleagues, your competitors, your boss and maybe even your neighbors. And being on LinkedIn puts you in the company of people with impressive credentials: The average member is a college educated 43-year-old making $107,000. More than a quarter are senior executives. Every Fortune 500 company is represented. That's why recruiters rely on the site to find even the highest-caliber executives: Oracle found CFO Jeff Epstein via LinkedIn in 2008.

The reason LinkenIn works so well for professional match-making is that most of its members already have jobs. This population is more valuable to recruiters because they are looking for passive candidates. The $8 billion recruiting industry is built on the fact that they are hard to find. LinkedIn changes that. It's the equivalent of a little black book--highly detailed and exposed for everyone to see.

Source: FORTUNE, April 12, 2010