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Frank Sherfey
Frank Sherfey

- LinkedIn has become an important professional networking site, with over 60 million members and 17.6 million monthly visitors. - Recruiters and companies increasingly use LinkedIn to find both active and passive job candidates. Accenture plans to hire 50,000 people this year and relies on LinkedIn to find candidates. - Members create profiles detailing their employment history and build connections to people they know from prior jobs or clients. This allows both job seekers and recruiters to more easily find potential matches.

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http://money.cnn.com/fdcp?1269527328815 Says he: "This is the future of recruiting for How LinkedIn will our company." fire up your career Facebook is for fun. Tweets have a short shelf life. If you're serious about managing your career, the only social site that really matters is LinkedIn. In today's job market an invitation to "join my professional network" has become more obligatory -- and more useful -- than swapping business cards and churning out r¨¦sum¨¦s. More than 60 million members have logged on to create profiles, upload their employment histories, and build connections with people they know. Visitors to the site have jumped 31% from last year to By Jessi Hempel, writer 17.6 million in February. They include your March 25, 2010: 7:47 AM ET customers. Your colleagues. Your competitors. Your boss. And being on (Fortune) -- If you need a job, or just want a LinkedIn puts you in the company of people better one, here's a number that will give you with impressive credentials: The average hope: 50,000. That's how many people the member is a college-educated 43-year-old giant consulting firm Accenture plans to hire making $107,000. More than a quarter are this year. Yes, actual jobs, with pay. It's senior executives. Every Fortune 500 looking for telecom consultants, finance company is represented. That's why experts, software specialists, and many recruiters rely on the site to find even the more. You could be one of them -- but will highest-caliber executives: Oracle (ORCL, Accenture find you? Advertisement To pick these hires the old-fashioned way, the firm would rely on headhunters, employee referrals, and job boards. But the game has changed. To get the attention of John Campagnino, Accenture's head of global recruiting, you'd better be on the web. 1 of 7 3/25/2010 7:28 AM
http://money.cnn.com/fdcp?1269527328815 Fortune 500) found CFO Jeff Epstein via manager, global sourcing specialist) that will LinkedIn in 2008. send your name to the top of recruiters' searches. The reason LinkedIn works so well for professional matchmaking is that most of its At the same time, you can connect your members already have jobs. A cadre of online professional interactions in one place, happily employed people use it to research joining groups on the site (LinkedIn has clients before sales calls, ask their more than 500,000 of them, based on connections for advice, and read up on companies, schools, and affinities), offering where former colleagues are landing gigs. advice, and linking your Twitter account and blog updates to your profile. In this environment, job seekers can do their networking without looking as if they're "You Google other people, so don't you think shopping themselves around. This p they're Googling you?" LinkedIn founder opulation is more valuable to recruiters as Reid Hoffman asks. "Part of a networked well. While online job boards like Monster. world is that people will be looking you up, com focus on showcasing active job and when they do, you want to control what hunters, very often the most talented and they find." Helping you present yourself well sought-after recruits are those currently online is just the start. LinkedIn plans to go employed. Headhunters have a name for far beyond, making itself an active and people like these: passive candidates. The $8 indispensable tool for your career path. The billion recruiting industry is built on the fact secrets lie buried in the data: those 60 that they are hard to find. LinkedIn changes million profiles, including yours. that. It's the equivalent of a little black book -- highly detailed and exposed for everyone In a business where data wonks are rock to see. stars, Dipchand ("Deep") Nishar is Bono. During his five-year tenure at Google ( For a generation of professionals trained to GOOG, Fortune 500), Nishar, 41, was cloak their contacts at all costs, this Advertisement transparency is counterintuitive. So far most conversations about how to use social networks professionally have focused on what not to do: Don't share drunken photos on Facebook. Don't use Twitter to brag about playing hooky from the office. But as companies turn to the web to mine for 2 of 7 3/25/2010 7:28 AM
http://money.cnn.com/fdcp?1269527328815 instrumental in developing its ad platform, startups (including Facebook), so it was its mobile strategy, and products for the natural for him to think of a way for people Asia-Pacific region. Hoffman spent almost a to build on their links. year recruiting him to be vice president of products, until finally, in January 2009, "I realized that everyone will have their Nishar took a right out of Google's Mountain professional identity online so they can be View, Calif., parking lot and drove two blocks discoverable for the things that will be to his new office at LinkedIn's headquarters. important to them," he remembers, waving his hand as he sits back in his chair. "The Having so much experience in Asia, where obvious one is jobs, but it's not just jobs. It's mobile messaging and other social networks w also clients and services. It's people looking ere adopted even faster than in the U.S., to trade tips on how you do, say, debt Nishar understood the value of a system that financing in the new capital markets." Backed would help consumers organize all those by other angel investors like him, Hoffman digital relationships. and four others put up the initial funding and gathered a tiny staff to launch the site as But it was one personal interaction that really a bare-bones operation in his Mountain View sold him on LinkedIn's potential. Nishar was home. trying to decide whether his daughter, who was 12 at the time, should spend her At first, users were slow to embrace the summer at a program offered by Johns service. Plenty of Web 2.0 entertainment Hopkins University. He posted the question websites were enjoying meteoric rises and to his status update on both Facebook and monstrous buyouts by big media c LinkedIn. While he received more comments ompanies. (In fact, after helping fund on Facebook, they were casual and YouTube, Hoffman gave its founders office congratulatory. Only four of his LinkedIn space for three weeks in their early days.) contacts wrote him, but they offered a rich analysis, describing experiences with the By comparison, LinkedIn seemed a little Johns Hopkins program that left them better Advertisement off academically; they persuaded him to enroll his daughter. "People are in a different context and mindset when they're in a professional network," he says. This was Hoffman's bet when he founded the site in 2003. It was just after eBay (EBAY, Fortune 500) paid $1.5 billion to buy PayPal, 3 of 7 3/25/2010 7:28 AM
http://money.cnn.com/fdcp?1269527328815 static; it was only for r¨¦sum¨¦s. As Facebook heads U.S. recruiting for IBM (IBM, Fortune caught on among bona fide adults, it created 500). "In a company the size of IBM, that's a population of web users fluent in updating significant." their status, posting links, and microblogging. Hoffman could sense that IBM has always been one of the first social networking was finally becoming companies to experiment with new social mainstream, and he needed to give technologies. Its recruiters use Twitter to LinkedIn's users a reason to stick around broadcast job openings, and the company before they moved their r¨¦sum¨¦s and other organizes its own talent communities. But professional information to platforms like Jones says LinkedIn is the most important Facebook. So last December he recruited social-media site for reaching prospective former Yahoo exec Jeff Weiner to step into hires. the CEO position. And he won over Nishar. Cost saving is a major motivation for John Klodnicki wasn't looking for a job when companies looking to bypass big he took the call from an IBM recruiter who headhunting firms. "If I were going to go out had found his profile on LinkedIn. As a to a major recruiting firm, for example, we program director for data-storage company could potentially pay upwards of $100,000 EMC, he spent five days a week on the road to $150,000 for one person," says consulting with pharmaceutical companies. Accenture's Campagnino. "Start multiplying "I was moderately happy," he said. Sure, all that by a number of senior executives, and that traveling was a drag. you start talking about significant numbers of dollars very quickly." On that Friday afternoon Klodnicki was scarfing a sandwich while standing in the If anybody should be nervous about that, it's security line at the airport in Providence, L. Kevin Kelly. As CEO of Heidrick & trying to get home to his family in New Struggles, one of the most prominent Jersey. The line was long, so he had the time recruiting firms, he has made a living out of to chat about opportunities. After going Advertisement through several rounds of interviews, the initial job fell through, but the relationship had been started. He kept in touch, and last September, Klodnicki started work as an associate partner developing new business with pharmaceutical companies at IBM's Philadelphia office, just half an hour from his home. 4 of 7 3/25/2010 7:28 AM
http://money.cnn.com/fdcp?1269527328815 the hiring market's opacity. As he watched for the bulk of the company's positions, the rise of LinkedIn, he knew it was a mostly in their retail stores. Though plenty disruptive force he would have to learn well; of cashiers and doctors and teachers join last summer he flew to the Bay Area to have LinkedIn, the site's primary membership is dinner with Hoffman. corporate professionals. Their companies have a complicated Now Guthrie uses LinkedIn mostly for three relationship. On the one hand, LinkedIn is a hard-to-fill areas: supply chain, information welcome tool for recruiters, and Heidrick & technology, and global sourcing. Some of Struggles is a customer. LinkedIn's software Guthrie's recruiters spend time daily on the allows recruiters to search its database site, reading up on potential candidates, without access to photographs, thus chatting with them in groups and on keeping in compliance with message boards, and responding to antidiscrimination laws, and to contact inquiries. The approach has worked well. anybody in the LinkedIn network. But the Using services like this on the Internet she recession forced companies to cut back on has been able to bring down the time it takes their budgets for outside firms. to fill the positions, an important metric among recruiters, by nearly half. Heidrick & Struggles' revenues fell 36% in 2009, and while business has started to At the entry to the "Hope" classroom on the creep back, Kelly is aggressively trying to satellite campus of Belhaven University in remake the company as an adviser rather Houston, Susan Thorpe passes out a small than simply a search company, offering book called 12.5 Ways to Get Ahead on consulting on ways to handle staffing issues LinkedIn. Up front, her husband, Doug and select board members. Now it's just 7% Thorpe, who self-published the guide, has of the business, but he expects it to grow to drawn a diagram on the whiteboard that half of what Heidrick & Struggles does. looks like an elaborate football play. A series of circles labeled one, two, and three stretch There will still be a need for headhunters and Advertisement traditional methods of hiring, though, because LinkedIn doesn't work for everything. And it has to be used carefully. "If you're not managing that site, you can erode your brand," says Arlette Guthrie, the vice president of talent management at Home Depot. Guthrie has learned how to use 5 of 7 3/25/2010 7:28 AM
http://money.cnn.com/fdcp?1269527328815 out from a central bubble labeled you. A amount of time on the site each day, say 30 dozen job seekers take notes as Thorpe minutes. Believe it or not, LinkedIn doesn't describes how to call upon first-level pay this guy. contacts -- those former colleagues and friends you've befriended on the site -- to There is much debate in the class about reach second-level contacts. It's a process Thorpe's suggestion that job seekers should as old as human relations: Hey, could you include professional photographs with their introduce me to your friend? Thorpe profiles. ("Don't use dogs, horses, cats, or explains the etiquette and technique of cows in the background," he says.) Older job doing it digitally. "Write a personal note when seekers in particular are worried that their you ask someone to connect," he tells his gray hair will trigger age discrimination. students. There are drawbacks to so much transparency, they argue. Doesn't it ensure Thorpe, 57, is one of hundreds of that employers potentially know more about consultants who have sprung up to help you than they should? professionals establish themselves online. A fter he lost his mortgage company two It's a question Hoffman considered right years ago in the real estate crash, he started from the start. For all the benefit that Jobs Ministry Southwest, a religious LinkedIn brings to the job hunt, it can't erase nonprofit that offers free support for job fundamental challenges in the job market. seekers in the greater Houston area. A One big reality is that plenty of baby dozen of the 160 people who attended the boomers are out of work as the industries in previous day's support group have paid which they've developed three decades of $24.95 for a half-day introduction to expertise move overseas or change LinkedIn. irrevocably. Thorpe's main message to his clients is that These job hunters will need to reinvent it's important to complete your profile. Get themselves in new careers. The thing about recommendations from former co-workers. Advertisement Use keywords to bring out the skills you want to highlight. Join groups: Recruiters often scour professional groups to round up potential candidates. Answer questions from colleagues that showcase your professional expertise. One of the students, Heinz Meyer, exhales 6 of 7 3/25/2010 7:28 AM
http://money.cnn.com/fdcp?1269527328815 social-networking profiles is that they don't lie, at least not successfully. You can't fudge your experience or hide your age, because your connections know you in real life. So H offman is inclined to agree with Thorpe's advice: Post your photo. "A LinkedIn profile lets you represent yourself as strong as you can, so build that to your advantage," he says. Okay, but how do you finally land a job? It's the last question that Thorpe's students ask as he wraps up his lecture. Thorpe turns back to the elaborate diagram on the board, pointing to the circled numbers. Social networking is just a more efficient way of reaching out to people you know -- and people they know. You work the network. You connect with people like John Campagnino at Accenture if you want a job in consulting. Then you turn off the computer, and you call your connections on the phone. And you invite them to lunch. Advertisement 7 of 7 3/25/2010 7:28 AM

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  • 1. http://money.cnn.com/fdcp?1269527328815 Says he: "This is the future of recruiting for How LinkedIn will our company." fire up your career Facebook is for fun. Tweets have a short shelf life. If you're serious about managing your career, the only social site that really matters is LinkedIn. In today's job market an invitation to "join my professional network" has become more obligatory -- and more useful -- than swapping business cards and churning out r¨¦sum¨¦s. More than 60 million members have logged on to create profiles, upload their employment histories, and build connections with people they know. Visitors to the site have jumped 31% from last year to By Jessi Hempel, writer 17.6 million in February. They include your March 25, 2010: 7:47 AM ET customers. Your colleagues. Your competitors. Your boss. And being on (Fortune) -- If you need a job, or just want a LinkedIn puts you in the company of people better one, here's a number that will give you with impressive credentials: The average hope: 50,000. That's how many people the member is a college-educated 43-year-old giant consulting firm Accenture plans to hire making $107,000. More than a quarter are this year. Yes, actual jobs, with pay. It's senior executives. Every Fortune 500 looking for telecom consultants, finance company is represented. That's why experts, software specialists, and many recruiters rely on the site to find even the more. You could be one of them -- but will highest-caliber executives: Oracle (ORCL, Accenture find you? Advertisement To pick these hires the old-fashioned way, the firm would rely on headhunters, employee referrals, and job boards. But the game has changed. To get the attention of John Campagnino, Accenture's head of global recruiting, you'd better be on the web. 1 of 7 3/25/2010 7:28 AM
  • 2. http://money.cnn.com/fdcp?1269527328815 Fortune 500) found CFO Jeff Epstein via manager, global sourcing specialist) that will LinkedIn in 2008. send your name to the top of recruiters' searches. The reason LinkedIn works so well for professional matchmaking is that most of its At the same time, you can connect your members already have jobs. A cadre of online professional interactions in one place, happily employed people use it to research joining groups on the site (LinkedIn has clients before sales calls, ask their more than 500,000 of them, based on connections for advice, and read up on companies, schools, and affinities), offering where former colleagues are landing gigs. advice, and linking your Twitter account and blog updates to your profile. In this environment, job seekers can do their networking without looking as if they're "You Google other people, so don't you think shopping themselves around. This p they're Googling you?" LinkedIn founder opulation is more valuable to recruiters as Reid Hoffman asks. "Part of a networked well. While online job boards like Monster. world is that people will be looking you up, com focus on showcasing active job and when they do, you want to control what hunters, very often the most talented and they find." Helping you present yourself well sought-after recruits are those currently online is just the start. LinkedIn plans to go employed. Headhunters have a name for far beyond, making itself an active and people like these: passive candidates. The $8 indispensable tool for your career path. The billion recruiting industry is built on the fact secrets lie buried in the data: those 60 that they are hard to find. LinkedIn changes million profiles, including yours. that. It's the equivalent of a little black book -- highly detailed and exposed for everyone In a business where data wonks are rock to see. stars, Dipchand ("Deep") Nishar is Bono. During his five-year tenure at Google ( For a generation of professionals trained to GOOG, Fortune 500), Nishar, 41, was cloak their contacts at all costs, this Advertisement transparency is counterintuitive. So far most conversations about how to use social networks professionally have focused on what not to do: Don't share drunken photos on Facebook. Don't use Twitter to brag about playing hooky from the office. But as companies turn to the web to mine for 2 of 7 3/25/2010 7:28 AM
  • 3. http://money.cnn.com/fdcp?1269527328815 instrumental in developing its ad platform, startups (including Facebook), so it was its mobile strategy, and products for the natural for him to think of a way for people Asia-Pacific region. Hoffman spent almost a to build on their links. year recruiting him to be vice president of products, until finally, in January 2009, "I realized that everyone will have their Nishar took a right out of Google's Mountain professional identity online so they can be View, Calif., parking lot and drove two blocks discoverable for the things that will be to his new office at LinkedIn's headquarters. important to them," he remembers, waving his hand as he sits back in his chair. "The Having so much experience in Asia, where obvious one is jobs, but it's not just jobs. It's mobile messaging and other social networks w also clients and services. It's people looking ere adopted even faster than in the U.S., to trade tips on how you do, say, debt Nishar understood the value of a system that financing in the new capital markets." Backed would help consumers organize all those by other angel investors like him, Hoffman digital relationships. and four others put up the initial funding and gathered a tiny staff to launch the site as But it was one personal interaction that really a bare-bones operation in his Mountain View sold him on LinkedIn's potential. Nishar was home. trying to decide whether his daughter, who was 12 at the time, should spend her At first, users were slow to embrace the summer at a program offered by Johns service. Plenty of Web 2.0 entertainment Hopkins University. He posted the question websites were enjoying meteoric rises and to his status update on both Facebook and monstrous buyouts by big media c LinkedIn. While he received more comments ompanies. (In fact, after helping fund on Facebook, they were casual and YouTube, Hoffman gave its founders office congratulatory. Only four of his LinkedIn space for three weeks in their early days.) contacts wrote him, but they offered a rich analysis, describing experiences with the By comparison, LinkedIn seemed a little Johns Hopkins program that left them better Advertisement off academically; they persuaded him to enroll his daughter. "People are in a different context and mindset when they're in a professional network," he says. This was Hoffman's bet when he founded the site in 2003. It was just after eBay (EBAY, Fortune 500) paid $1.5 billion to buy PayPal, 3 of 7 3/25/2010 7:28 AM
  • 4. http://money.cnn.com/fdcp?1269527328815 static; it was only for r¨¦sum¨¦s. As Facebook heads U.S. recruiting for IBM (IBM, Fortune caught on among bona fide adults, it created 500). "In a company the size of IBM, that's a population of web users fluent in updating significant." their status, posting links, and microblogging. Hoffman could sense that IBM has always been one of the first social networking was finally becoming companies to experiment with new social mainstream, and he needed to give technologies. Its recruiters use Twitter to LinkedIn's users a reason to stick around broadcast job openings, and the company before they moved their r¨¦sum¨¦s and other organizes its own talent communities. But professional information to platforms like Jones says LinkedIn is the most important Facebook. So last December he recruited social-media site for reaching prospective former Yahoo exec Jeff Weiner to step into hires. the CEO position. And he won over Nishar. Cost saving is a major motivation for John Klodnicki wasn't looking for a job when companies looking to bypass big he took the call from an IBM recruiter who headhunting firms. "If I were going to go out had found his profile on LinkedIn. As a to a major recruiting firm, for example, we program director for data-storage company could potentially pay upwards of $100,000 EMC, he spent five days a week on the road to $150,000 for one person," says consulting with pharmaceutical companies. Accenture's Campagnino. "Start multiplying "I was moderately happy," he said. Sure, all that by a number of senior executives, and that traveling was a drag. you start talking about significant numbers of dollars very quickly." On that Friday afternoon Klodnicki was scarfing a sandwich while standing in the If anybody should be nervous about that, it's security line at the airport in Providence, L. Kevin Kelly. As CEO of Heidrick & trying to get home to his family in New Struggles, one of the most prominent Jersey. The line was long, so he had the time recruiting firms, he has made a living out of to chat about opportunities. After going Advertisement through several rounds of interviews, the initial job fell through, but the relationship had been started. He kept in touch, and last September, Klodnicki started work as an associate partner developing new business with pharmaceutical companies at IBM's Philadelphia office, just half an hour from his home. 4 of 7 3/25/2010 7:28 AM
  • 5. http://money.cnn.com/fdcp?1269527328815 the hiring market's opacity. As he watched for the bulk of the company's positions, the rise of LinkedIn, he knew it was a mostly in their retail stores. Though plenty disruptive force he would have to learn well; of cashiers and doctors and teachers join last summer he flew to the Bay Area to have LinkedIn, the site's primary membership is dinner with Hoffman. corporate professionals. Their companies have a complicated Now Guthrie uses LinkedIn mostly for three relationship. On the one hand, LinkedIn is a hard-to-fill areas: supply chain, information welcome tool for recruiters, and Heidrick & technology, and global sourcing. Some of Struggles is a customer. LinkedIn's software Guthrie's recruiters spend time daily on the allows recruiters to search its database site, reading up on potential candidates, without access to photographs, thus chatting with them in groups and on keeping in compliance with message boards, and responding to antidiscrimination laws, and to contact inquiries. The approach has worked well. anybody in the LinkedIn network. But the Using services like this on the Internet she recession forced companies to cut back on has been able to bring down the time it takes their budgets for outside firms. to fill the positions, an important metric among recruiters, by nearly half. Heidrick & Struggles' revenues fell 36% in 2009, and while business has started to At the entry to the "Hope" classroom on the creep back, Kelly is aggressively trying to satellite campus of Belhaven University in remake the company as an adviser rather Houston, Susan Thorpe passes out a small than simply a search company, offering book called 12.5 Ways to Get Ahead on consulting on ways to handle staffing issues LinkedIn. Up front, her husband, Doug and select board members. Now it's just 7% Thorpe, who self-published the guide, has of the business, but he expects it to grow to drawn a diagram on the whiteboard that half of what Heidrick & Struggles does. looks like an elaborate football play. A series of circles labeled one, two, and three stretch There will still be a need for headhunters and Advertisement traditional methods of hiring, though, because LinkedIn doesn't work for everything. And it has to be used carefully. "If you're not managing that site, you can erode your brand," says Arlette Guthrie, the vice president of talent management at Home Depot. Guthrie has learned how to use 5 of 7 3/25/2010 7:28 AM
  • 6. http://money.cnn.com/fdcp?1269527328815 out from a central bubble labeled you. A amount of time on the site each day, say 30 dozen job seekers take notes as Thorpe minutes. Believe it or not, LinkedIn doesn't describes how to call upon first-level pay this guy. contacts -- those former colleagues and friends you've befriended on the site -- to There is much debate in the class about reach second-level contacts. It's a process Thorpe's suggestion that job seekers should as old as human relations: Hey, could you include professional photographs with their introduce me to your friend? Thorpe profiles. ("Don't use dogs, horses, cats, or explains the etiquette and technique of cows in the background," he says.) Older job doing it digitally. "Write a personal note when seekers in particular are worried that their you ask someone to connect," he tells his gray hair will trigger age discrimination. students. There are drawbacks to so much transparency, they argue. Doesn't it ensure Thorpe, 57, is one of hundreds of that employers potentially know more about consultants who have sprung up to help you than they should? professionals establish themselves online. A fter he lost his mortgage company two It's a question Hoffman considered right years ago in the real estate crash, he started from the start. For all the benefit that Jobs Ministry Southwest, a religious LinkedIn brings to the job hunt, it can't erase nonprofit that offers free support for job fundamental challenges in the job market. seekers in the greater Houston area. A One big reality is that plenty of baby dozen of the 160 people who attended the boomers are out of work as the industries in previous day's support group have paid which they've developed three decades of $24.95 for a half-day introduction to expertise move overseas or change LinkedIn. irrevocably. Thorpe's main message to his clients is that These job hunters will need to reinvent it's important to complete your profile. Get themselves in new careers. The thing about recommendations from former co-workers. Advertisement Use keywords to bring out the skills you want to highlight. Join groups: Recruiters often scour professional groups to round up potential candidates. Answer questions from colleagues that showcase your professional expertise. One of the students, Heinz Meyer, exhales 6 of 7 3/25/2010 7:28 AM
  • 7. http://money.cnn.com/fdcp?1269527328815 social-networking profiles is that they don't lie, at least not successfully. You can't fudge your experience or hide your age, because your connections know you in real life. So H offman is inclined to agree with Thorpe's advice: Post your photo. "A LinkedIn profile lets you represent yourself as strong as you can, so build that to your advantage," he says. Okay, but how do you finally land a job? It's the last question that Thorpe's students ask as he wraps up his lecture. Thorpe turns back to the elaborate diagram on the board, pointing to the circled numbers. Social networking is just a more efficient way of reaching out to people you know -- and people they know. You work the network. You connect with people like John Campagnino at Accenture if you want a job in consulting. Then you turn off the computer, and you call your connections on the phone. And you invite them to lunch. Advertisement 7 of 7 3/25/2010 7:28 AM