Thanks for sharing

No, back to your question.
#1 It’s important to build a solid network in your niche. This includes networking with all types of recruiters, corporate, executive, and staffing professionals, as well as employees in the companies. Recruiters in general are highly connected people. Kind of like sales people. They get paid to find employees for employers. Notice: they get paid to “find candidates for employers” not the other way around “jobs for candidates”. So, to your point, you are right on.
The problem is you have to be “found”. And the best way to be found is to know the recruiters. If you have an existing relationship with them they might know your personality, your skills, and how it would fit for the company that is looking. A resume by itself doesn’t help when it comes to “culture fit”. So, having a relationship with the recruiters, is very important.

#2 Recruiter have a lot of connections, not just “online connections”, but real relationships within companies and industries. Getting to know recruiters, and trying to help them, helps you, because some day, you might need their help, and even if they are not working a specific job opening, they might be willing to connect you to someone who can help you.

#3 Connecting with corporate recruiters is a very smart idea, because they are connected to hiring managers in their current company, as well as hiring managers in their previous companies. So, those relationships might help you as well.

#4 Connecting to Recruiters on sites like LinkedIn is Really a good idea, and here’s why… The LinkedIn search engine only returns the results of the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd degree connections of the person doing the search. If you have built connections to recruiters, and they are connected to the hiring manager in their former company, you would show up in the hiring managers search results as a 2nd degree connection. If you didn’t have that connection, or a similar connection, the hiring manager doing a search on LinkedIn would never see your profile. (This is a short version, Here’s a video that describes it the LinkedIn Search Engine.

I hope this helps

Don’t worry about it though, I don’t think this point is a deciding factor in people creating a Linkedin profile who have not done so thus far. Which I think was one of the objectives of your post?

My knowledge in this area? I own/ run a specialist recruitment business and last year authored “Get Well Connected – Gain interviews & Grow Your Career Using Online Social Networking”. The reason I wrote this? Because I saw time after time the shortfalls of the job board market in finding senior or sector specific people.

Janet – I don’t agree with you that it is AND not OR – my view is that each serves a different part of the market. From middle management level up the problem is not with the jobboards – its with the process… hundreds of people applying for a role / recruiters & employers not even bothering to acknowledge applications / the perception by the employer that they only get the desperates / the insecurity of personal details when placing your CV on job boards ( google “monster identities theft “) and the blind aspect of the way ads are placed by recruiters leading to some people in-advertedly applying to their current employer for a new role!

So: My conclusion, Job boards are good for the lower end of the market, but for specialist, senior, high profile roles, and for great social proof of someone’s competency / skillset then Linkedin is the powerhouse. Its where I start everytime. To this end, through my Job Hunter training business every client we have worked with this year who has landed a new role has done so through ‘networking’ – on and offline.

A great example of this is a guy who applied for nearly 600 roles online without a single interview, after starting his new approach to 20 select targets, using on and off line networking he was invited for 5 interviews and landed a new role with much improved renumeration.

Good post buddy. I have been telling my colleagues the same thing over the last several years. Why fish in the same pond as the boards? I mostly leave that for other recruiters. With LinkedIn, the art of the referral becomes more crucial for taking things to the next level. You can’t retweet from Monster/Dice either… Oh and if your InMail doesn’t get read in 7 days, you receive the credit back so you can approach other people in and around your network on LI.

Regards,

Jay

Point 3. Are you debating whether Monster has not seen a decrease in resume access licenses in the last 18 months? If you want to share the number of resume database licenses sold in 2008 compared to 2009, I’d gladly print those numbers.

Point 5: Regarding LinkedIn being the largest community of recruiters.
Show me a directory on Monster where job seekers can do a search for recruiters by title, company, etc. Doesn’t exist. So, Monster can’t compete as a source of job seekers trying to search for recruiters or company employees to build connections and network with them.