The Power of LinkedIn

A coworker of mine has inspired me to dust off my old blog and try publishing some learnings from the adventures of my career.

Today I want to write about the power of LinkedIn. I've found it to be quite useful for a few specific situations, and hopefully I'll have a reader who gets some value from these learnings. LinkedIn is funny as it's so similar to other social networks like Facebook in the way you find and establish connections between people, however it's so very different in that I've never seen it used for hanging out with friends and instead I've only seen it used for professional networking. (It's a fascinating story from a product perspective of how each of these services position themselves for these two very distinct purposes, but that's an entire separate topic for another time.)

I've heard from some friends that they spent a ton of time developing a LinkedIn network and NEVER found any reason to use it. Well, I've found a couple of good uses and here I am sharing.

The primarily use I've seen is in job recruiting. Many employers like to believe they've hired smart people, and that those smart people must know other smart people. I've seen a number of colleagues (myself included) use LinkedIn to advertise job openings at their companies. The WSJ recently reported that about half of all jobs are filled by those that are known to the employer. Thus, LinkedIn is a clear winner for trying to find good people or trying to find a job.

The second use I've found is in connecting people to people. My first full time job was for a startup dot com company. Unfortunately, we all know the dot com boom went bust in not too much time and so I haven't worked there for nearly a decade. But, I still keep in touch with the founder of that company; he continues to innovate in the online world and occasionally has the need to reach out to large online companies like Facebook, AOL, MySpace etc. While I don't have terribly close friends at all these large internet companies, I've come to find I'm usually just one person away from such contacts. Meaning, some of my LinkedIn colleagues know employees of these companies and are very willing to make an introduction. I was actually surprised to find out just how few people there are between myself and very powerful executives from large internet companies. It's a small world out there; having that common contact who is willing to make a warm introduction can go a long way towards having that target person open up to you.

One of the best things I've learned from the last 4+ years working in a sales organization is the amazing the power of relationships. If my former boss were to attempt to reach out directly to these large internet companies cold, he quite possibly would have had a lot of trouble getting through. But a warm welcome & introduction can go a long way.

So, make sure you're on Linked-in, develop an extensive network, continually add people as you meet them, and use those connections!