More and more professionals seek out LinkedIn

Tired of the flashy decor and adolescent social scene on MySpace, Melissa Andrews recently joined LinkedIn, a Web site that offers a professional-oriented alternative.

Connecting with friends and colleagues in a more buttoned-down setting, she thought, might help in landing a new job if she ever decided to leave her position with United Way of the Bay Area, where she coordinates donations.

In the two months since becoming a member, Andrews has linked up with old college friends and shared career advice. Every week, it seems, she's adding new names to her list -- more than two dozen people, in all -- including an attorney, a schoolteacher and even a nun.

"I reached a point in my career where I need to be open to new opportunities," Andrews said. "I'm bored with social networking, but I still need to put myself out there on a more professional level."

Many people are doing the same. Founded four years ago, LinkedIn recently has enjoyed a big growth spurt, spreading its appeal beyond its original Silicon Valley-centric clientele.

Unique visitors to LinkedIn grew to 4.9 million in November, nearly triple the number from a year earlier, according to Nielsen Online.

The site's popularity is part of the broader success of online social networking, albeit with a more serious tilt than its better-known contemporaries, MySpace and Facebook. The idea of linking with acquaintances, whether to gab or kick-start a career, appeals to a broad slice of the online world.

To join LinkedIn, users register and create an online resume. They can then connect with friends and business acquaintances who are members to help stay in touch or find a new job.

Adding to LinkedIn's arsenal is the ability to find out who knows whom. Getting hired at a company is more likely if you have a friend of a friend who already works there.

Many users have hundreds of connections, making them seem like the most popular kid in class or an inveterate networker. More distant contacts can easily number in the tens of thousands.

To give users more reason to visit regularly, LinkedIn, based in Mountain View, Calif., is unveiling new products this week including a revamped home page with a news feed. Over the next couple months, users will start seeing a list of news stories on the page that are geared to their interests, based on the companies listed in their resume and the articles that their friends click on most frequently.

Additionally, LinkedIn will start allowing certain outside developers to create new services for users. Members who visit Business Week's Web site, for instance, will be able to easily look up the LinkedIn profiles of people featured in the magazine's articles.

For most of LinkedIn's users, the service is free. However, power users such as recruiters and salesmen seeking business leads pay extra to be able to contact a broader universe of people.

In addition to such monthly subscriptions, LinkedIn makes money from job postings and advertising. The company, which says it's profitable, expects up to $100 million in revenue in 2008.

Nye said that an initial public offering may be in LinkedIn's future. More recently, the company was rumored to be an acquisition target of News Corp., Rupert Murdoch's media empire that will soon include the Wall Street Journal, among other business publications, an issue that Nye declined to comment on.

In all, LinkedIn has 17 million members, although not all of them are active. Every day, 42,000 new recruits join, many of them outside the site's technology-centric career pool, such as attorneys, bankers and health care workers.

Executives from virtually every Fortune 500 company have posted a profile, in keeping with the site's affluent ($108,000 average annual salary) and middle-age (average age is 41) demographics.

Faith Sedlin, chief marketing officer for Oodle, an online classified site in San Mateo, has used LinkedIn from nearly the start and said that it has come in handy for a number of things. Her in-box is filled with messages from people in her network, some 280 strong, including from someone seeking references to fill an open job and another looking for a volunteer to judge a contest involving nonprofits.

Sedlin said she's used the service to vet some of her company's job candidates by checking in with people who know them, based on their LinkedIn connections. She's also found people to recruit by searching the site.

"I've found it very valuable," Sedlin said.

E-mail Verne Kopytoff at vkopytoff(at)sfchronicle.com.

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)