LinkedIn - Review

This what the website says you can do:

LinkedIn is a place to find and leverage professional opportunities, now and throughout your career. LinkedIn enables you to:

• Present yourself and your professional capabilities
• Find and reconnect with colleagues and classmates
• Leverage powerful tools to find and reach the people you need
• Build a powerful network of trusted professionals
• Discover professional relationships and opportunities
• Tap into inside connections and information
• Get the edge that gives you competitive advantage

There are already 9 million professionals in the LinkedIn Network and that number is growing fast. Whether you seek a job, a hire, a reference, a sales lead, an expert, or an inside connection at one of 50,000 companies, LinkedIn is an irreplaceable resource for building your professional relationships and achieving your goals.

This is what other people are saying:

A more common option for beginners is to search for current and former colleagues and contacts already linked up to LinkedIn. A handy feature lets you compare your Outlook address book against a list of current members, expediting the process of inviting people from the outside and building your business network from the ground up.

LinkedIn has a no-nonsense, all-business user interface. There are no forums, specific listings for job opportunities, or extra content here (as with Ryze and Tribe.net) beyond statistics about your network, including percentages of users who fall into categories (like job seekers and hiring managers) and distribution by industry and geography.

LinkedIn gives you excellent control of searches by name, title, geography, and industry type. You'll see only people in your network (those you're linked to by a chain of friends), however, so it's important that you cultivate connections. Once you locate a source, you can approach contacts about a job or other opportunity via a request page. In this beta version, users can have three outstanding requests at a time.

The governing principle is that persons of influence will be selective about passing along references, which are handed off to other contacts for approval. For three degrees of separation, you need two people to approve your request to approach a potential employer with a rèsumè, for example. When you sign in to your account, you're informed of outstanding reference requests, which you can accept or reject. Should a request be rejected, the person who asked for it is never informed who rejected it. This decreases the chances that inappropriate requests will be simply rubber-stamped.

While there are no profile photos for LinkedIn members, testimonials in the form of endorsements from other members can add weight to user profiles. According to LinkedIn, such endorsements significantly increase the odds of making successful contacts. Favorite contacts can be stored in an address book, though unlike the other services, LinkedIn doesn't have an extensive messaging system.

LinkedIn could change the way executive recruiting is conducted. As a general-purpose job site, it can undoubtedly work. And if you're fortunate enough to gain entrèe to its elite client list, it's a great resource for tapping venture capital, senior management, and technical expertise.