I regularly hear from job seekers  that they don’t like LinkedIn and are uncomfortable being on it.  They say:

  • I’m a private person and I don’t like people to know my business.
  • I don’t have time to be active on LinkedIn.
  • I have nothing useful to say.
  • It’s weird connecting with people online. I’d rather do it in-person.
  • Won’t everyone at work know I’m looking for a job if I’m on LinkedIn?
  • I don’t want to connect with certain people.

I have responses for each one of those objections in my next post, and also a few big reasons you need to be on LinkedIn.  Those reasons are:

  • Companies are hiring through LinkedIn.
  • People who aren’t on LinkedIn can’t be found by recruiters.
  • Networking is the #1 way people find jobs and LinkedIn is specifically for networking.

Here are a few facts about LinkedIn’s corporate hiring business, from an article on Workforce.com (to read it, you need to sign up – it’s free and a good site for job seekers to visit to see what HR is up to).

  • 55 percent of LinkedIn’s revenue, or $363 million, for the first nine months of 2012, came from corporate hiring/recruiting
  • More than 13,700 companies pay at least $8000 a year – per recruiter – for LinkedIn Recruiter. In early 2009, just 900 did. Remember, this jump happened during the Great Recession.
  • 1700 companies signed up for Recruiter in the 3rd quarter of 2012.
  • More than 2,400 recruiters from around the world attended LinkedIn’s 3rd U.S. corporate user conference in October, and another 500 were in London for the European  version.

LinkedIn is continuing to grow Recruiter. That’s the service allowing in-house and retained recruiters to search LinkedIn’s database of 187 million members to find the 20 or 30 candidates who meet their very specific criteria for the open position. It’s a relatively inexpensive way to source active and passive candidates – people looking for work and people who might be enticed to jump ship even if they’re happy where they are. The growth figures indicate that Recruiter is going to continue to grow as a go-to solution for employers of all sizes and in all industries.

So do your job search a favor, and get going on LinkedIn.

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