In my last article, I talked about the benefits of leveraging the alumni of the companies for which you’ve worked. This time I’m going to go a little deeper into how various online tools can be used to build collaborative alumni relationships that are easily maintained that will also provide value to every member.

But first, in the interest of full disclosure, I want to start off by saying that I joined Yahoo! in June of 2005, and that the Heidrick & Struggles Alumni group on Yahoo! was created in 2003 by Scott Levine.

Leave social networking sites to your social life
Social Networking sites are all the rage, but their largest demographic has not become executives yet. MySpace and Friendster are a great place to keep track of your friends, indie rock bands, and spammers that want to show you their webcams. Facebook has only recently “opened” its gates to people without a university alumni email address. I have heard a lot of great things about the groups on Facebook, but again, I haven’t seen it used for executive recruiting. (By all means, please email me if you have been successful using these Social Networking sites for recruiting executives!)

Professional networking for the professional recruiter

That brings me to the Professional Networking sites of LinkedIn, and the new guy on the block, Visible Path. I will not be discussing Spoke and Plaxo because at this point, most of my contacts no longer use those services. I would say that a whopping 95% of my contacts have switched over to LinkedIn in the last two years, and about 80% of those now use LinkedIn exclusively.

LinkedIn makes it easy to keep in touch with your business contacts and keep everyone up to date on your situation. Plus, they have over nine million people listed (I’m connected to about a third of them), which makes the tool extremely valuable to recruiters. Now, I’m the kind of user that LinkedIn doesn’t profit from. I don’t pay for InMails and I rarely ask a contact to forward an introduction. I stopped using LinkedIn introductions when I realized that my requests went un-forwarded by my contacts. I might have been more successful if I had asked them to look at my webcam. But instead, I just pick up the phone and make an introduction the “old fashioned” way.

Pros and cons
Visible Path helps solve this problem by ranking the strength of the relationships you have with your contacts. However, Visible Path is still in beta and I only have one connection. Over the last week, I’ve sent out a few requests to connect, but nobody has responded as the completion of this article. However, I’m hopeful that this tool will take off because I really like the concept of relationship ranking to find the strongest route to an introduction.

One thing that LinkedIn has that Visible Path doesn’t appear to have, is the ability to connect with university alumni as well as current/former colleagues without having to know their email addresses. LinkedIn pushes this to my front page and gives me a quick list of people with whom I have something in common. Most accept my invitations.

Both LinkedIn and Visible Path have built platforms to get introductions and manage your contacts. LinkedIn gives you the ability to ask your contacts for leads to candidates as well as to ask questions using their Answers product. But I want more from my recruiting tools. I want a tool that will give me the ability to share documents and have a shared calendar. I want the ability to chat with any of my contacts that happen to be logged in at the same time.

The alumni group advantage
I get these functions from the Yahoo! group for the Heidrick alumni. Scott Levine used Yahoo! Groups for those very features to keep track of the other alumni. Each time I connect to new Heidrick alum via LinkedIn, I invite that person to join the Heidrick Yahoo! Group. Within this group, we have managed to provide a lot of value to the all of the members using all of the tools Yahoo! has built into the system.

With that said, I would like LinkedIn, Visible Path, Spoke, and Plaxo to all take a look at ways of adding more collaboration-oriented tools into their products. I want to do more than just request and forward introductions. I want to provide more value to my contacts so that they’ll be more likely to help me when I need them.

Without features that allow us to build deeper and more powerful digital relationships, I may as well be asking them to view my webcam.