While I’m not currently looking for a job, I have recently discovered LinkedIn.com. So, what is LinkedIn? Think of it as one of those “friendster” type social networking web sites (frienster, orkut, etc), only for business professionals.

It’s totally free to use, you can upload your profile, add in your work history, and then solicit your co-workers to join and connect to your own personal network as well. After using their handy “yahoo address book importer” tool, I sent out an invitation to everyone. Suprisingly, several people responded and joined. The key is to add as many people to a “first degree” connection as possible. These would be friends, co-workers, etc - people you actually know.

I have 43 first degree connections, and through those and my connections’ connections “2nd degree, 3rd degree, etc”, I now have access to over 824,000 people in my business network. These people work for companies, and a lot of them are posting job reqs for when they are hiring.

You can also search for jobs as well via LinkedIn. I haven’t actually applied to any yet, but I have had a few recruiters call me who found my resume in the LinkedIn.com network.

If you want to add me to your first degree connection, just do a People Search for “Anthony Ettinger” and invite me to join your network!

Updating your resume and work history is somewhat time consuming (I simply copy/pasted from a current resume), but this is one of a select few sites in which I feel it’s worth the time filling out the cumbersome forms.