By Jason Buss.

LinkedIn continues to grow substantially, with record users and site visitors month over month. With over 21 million professionals worldwide representing 150 countries, LinkedIn received 9.5 million unique visitors in June. Year to date, traffic is up 77%.

While using LinkedIn as a recruiting tool is not new, I recently spent some time with a group of recruiters discussing the sites advantages, highlighting :

• Competitive intelligence, and research. LinkedIn is a great tool for researching companies. Uncheck the “current companies only, see who has left the organization, the average length of tenure, and possible trends. Think and search creatively, you may be surprised at the amount of information you can find. Since a majority of users set their profiles to public, you can also build a search string to search LinkedIn profiles using Google. It can take some creative searching, but there is a tremendous amount of information just waiting to be mined.
• Build your network with candidates. Connect with strong candidates immediately after you speak with them. There are several advantages to this, including: building a candidate community with top talent, following changes when they move or get promoted via network updates (stay connected, send a congratulatory note), you’ll see all of the names and titles in their networks.
• Pick up the phone! Your competitors and search firms are. You are wasting your time if you solely rely on the e-mail functionality. Sounds simple, but quite likely an under-utilized tactic in corporate recruiting.
• Network with Recommendations. Top performers know and network with top performers. Use recommendations on an individual’s profile to network and build leads.
• Use the “download as a PDF” tool. If you don’t have a Resume for a lead, download their profile with the PDF tool on LinkedIn. Share their profile with a Manager – are you on track? What’s missing from the profile they might be looking for in an ideal candidate? Is this lead with pursuing.

In addition to these 5, there are many other possibilities in using LinkedIn for recruiting talent. While many sites in the recruiting space have declining traffic, LinkedIn is just one tool, with many advantages including it’s growth and momentum.

Most recruiters are using it – and all have access to it. Get creative and get more out of the site than your competitors are.

Interested in building and growing your network? Connect with me, and add (bussjj (at) gmail (dot) com) as the e-mail address. And, click here to join 2,000+ HR and Recruiting Professionals on The Talent Buzz LinkedIn group.