Linkedin - www.linkedin.com

Joe Davenport

Sep 13, 2016

LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com) is the world's largest professional network with more than 450 million members in 200 countries and territories around the world. The site allows users (workers and employers) to create their profiles and connections to other accounts in an online network of their professional relationships. According to Alexa, LinkedIn is the 15th most-visited website on the Internet.

It is created with a simple mission: To connect the world's professionals to make them more productive and successful.

Signing up for a LinkedIn account is free and simple. You just need to fill out some necessary information about yourself and have an email address or a phone number. Go to our LinkedIn Sign Up page for a comprehensive instruction.

LinkedIn Features

User profile network

The basic feature of LinkedIn is to allow its users (workers and employers) to create profiles, whereby potential candidates could show their curriculum vitae of work experience, skills, education, and training. The site also enables its members to make connections with each other to form an online social network representing real-world professional relationships. These connections can be used in a number of ways:

Obtaining introduction to connections of connections (second-degree connections) and connections of second-degree connections (third-degree connections)
Finding jobs, people, business opportunities recommended by someone in one's contact network
Employers can list jobs and search for potential candidates.
Users can follow companies and see who visited their profile page.

Groups

LinkedIn supports the formation of interest groups. As of October 2016, there are more than 1.6 million groups on LinkedIn. The majority of the largest groups are employment-related, but there are groups with a wide range of other topics including professional and career issues, and even groups for both academic and corporate alumni. Groups support a limited form of discussion area, moderated by the group owners and managers. Groups also keep their members posted by informing via emails about any updates to the group including most-talked-about discussions within your professional circles. There are 3 levels of privacy that groups may have. Groups may be private, accessible to its members only or open to the public. Though, it still requires membership to post messages.

Job listings and online recruiting

Users can search for companies that they may be interested in working with. When typing the name of a company in the search box, statistics about that company are provided, which may include the location of the company's headquarter and offices, a list of present or former employees or the ratio of male to female employees. Companies have the option to allow job seekers to apply for positions using their LinkedIn profiles as resumes with the "Apply with LinkedIn" button.

LinkedIn is also increasingly used as a source for job recruiters to find potential candidates. By using the Advanced search tools, recruiters can find members matching their keywords with just a mouse click.