How LinkedIn Helps Passive Job Seekers Land Their Dream Jobs

Leah Arnold-Smeets

You already know by now that LinkedIn is a great tool to help with your job search, but it's also the place to be when you're NOT directly looking for a job. Passive job seekers are already employed, but willing to take on a new opportunity, should the offer fit the bill. So, whether you're actively seeking a job or not, LinkedIn is where it's at.

For those of you who just crawled out from the rock you were living under for a decade or so, LinkedIn is a professional social networking site that has morphed into one of the top tools recruiters use to find qualified candidates. Setting up a profile on LinkedIn is free and relatively simple, but it does require a bit of thought and time in order to complete your profile in its entirety (which is an important step if you want to get noticed). If you would like to learn more about how to optimize your LinkedIn profile, take a look at this post.

In a recent interview with The Washington Post, LinkedIn's VP of Talent Solutions and Insights, Dan Shapiro, indicated that "through regular surveys, LinkedIn has determined that 20 percent of its users are actively seeking new positions and 20 percent couldn’t be happier in their jobs. The remaining 60 percent fall into the passive job seeker category." 

Shapiro went on to state that the social networking site is working diligently on the back-end to find out exactly what it is that makes the "passive job seeker" believe a particular job is the right fit. If that question can be answered, LinkedIn will hold the key to a valuable recruiting tool that will take the guesswork out of matching jobs to candidates. Therefore, it's essential for active and passive job seekers to have complete and updated online profiles if they wish to catch the eye of social recruiters. Otherwise, you can just consider your lacking profile as a message to the recruiters that screams, "I'm too lazy to type out words; wait until you see my terrible work ethic. Hire me."

Check out this infographic from Masters in Human Resources that illustrates how LinkedIn has revolutionized the world of recruiting, with 97 percent of staffing representatives utilizing the social site for recruiting candidates.

See the infographic and read the complete PayScale.com article