LinkedIn is a powerful professional networking tool for recruiters. Fast approaching 12 million members, LinkedIn.com can be leveraged to:

• Find and be found by prospective jobseekers and other business contacts
• Grow a referral network
• Build influence with clients or hiring managers
• Conduct Competitive Intelligence research
• Stay in touch with people
• Heighten your corporate and personal brand

But what is a personal brand?

Personal branding is about you, not your company. In today’s hyper-connected and over-informed world branding is not about who you know, it’s about who knows you. Branding is personal name recognition. With this heightened recognition comes increased visibility. This in turn brings about improved influence and effectiveness both internally, with your organization, and externally with the rest of the world.

But that’s not all. Visibility and branding opens doors to future career opportunities, pay increases, promotions and business deals.

Leveraging LinedIn’s growth rate
A number like 12 million doesn’t explain the whole story because it is only a static snapshot of LinkedIn today. What’s more powerful is the fact they are adding 130,000 new users each week. About 12% of these users are in senior management roles, and at least half are opting in to learn about career opportunities. These 6 million-plus people are being recruited by over 200,000 recruiters currently active in LinkedIn, representing 147 industries, and 420 geographic locations worldwide.

All of the above is available to anyone willing to create a public profile, but there are some additional premium features worth exploring. Chief among those is the ability to send InMail – a private LinkedIn message – that on average receives a response 70% of the time. Add to that the ability to become an OpenLink member, allowing prospects to contact you via InMail at no cost to them, and it becomes obvious why many recruiters have chosen to pay for their own premium account.

Other items included in a premium membership

• The ability to see up to 200 anonymous profiles outside of your network
• Use of the one-click reference search to reveal people who have worked with someone in the past
• The ability to publish an expanded public profile like mine: www.linkedin.com/in/shally

A how-to primer
Once you find a profile of an individual you like, you have several options for contacting them. Right below their name is their title, employer and city/state. So you could…

1. Google “Company, City, State” for work numbers
2. Use Zabasearch.com to get their home number
3. Google “Firstname Lastname @company.com”
4. Request an introduction from your network
5. Use LinkedIn’s InMail

Note that while LinkedIn cannot prohibit recruiters from using methods 1-3, they do encourage and prefer that you utilize a request for a referral, or InMail, to initiate contact.

If you do choose to initiate contact via InMail, here are some suggestions on increasing your response rate. Note that on average 70% of messages receive a response, and those which do not are refunded to you after 7 days.

Increasing your InMail response rate

• Be clear, brief, informative and honest
• Personalize your message with something from their profile
• Direct them to your profile to build trust
• Use InMail for people “outside your network”

Join me next time as I explore how to dramatically improve your network’s effective reach while significantly boosting your brand. Upcoming articles in this series include:

• Little-known advanced search features to find more people than ever before, both inside and outside of LinkedIn
• Four things you didn’t know you could do with a profile
• What top recruiters do on LinkedIn
• How to use LinkedIn to conduct amazing competitive intelligence research
• Leveraging ad-ons LinkedIn provides, like the Toolbar and Project

Shally Steckerl is founder of JobMachine, Inc, and can be reached at www.jobmachine.net/shally.