Networking site caters to business

Online networking isn’t limited to the teens and twentysomethings who populate MySpace and Facebook.

More than 13 million business people — at a rate of 20 per minute — have signed up for LinkedIn, a business-networking Web site that invites users to submit their professional information and connect online with colleagues and other business contacts.

“Any way in which one uses your professional network in the real world, we want to enable you to do that more efficiently using LinkedIn,” said Kay Luo, spokeswoman for the Mountain View, Calif., company.

Users of the site fill out a profile that can include his or her education and professional background, with his or her current company and job title. As with other social-networking sites, he or she can add other users — who must accept the request — and view those users’ contacts.

LinkedIn members also can endorse users in their network with recommendations visible on that person’s public profile.

While the site includes job postings, Ms. Luo is quick to point out that LinkedIn is not a traditional job site.

“The problem with a traditional job board is only job-seekers go there, so it’s not a useful way of finding and building connections,” she said. “They don’t keep [their profile] current. Once they find a job, they’re done with it.”

The company’s members span 147 industries. The average user is older than 29 and has an average household income of $139,000, Ms. Luo said.

The site is free to join, but LinkedIn sells premium accounts as well as corporate memberships, which range from $10,000 to as much as $500,000 annually, depending on the size of the company and how it uses the site, she said. She noted that all Fortune 500 corporations are members of LinkedIn.

Mikolaj Jan Piskorski, an assistant professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, said the site has had a phenomenal effect on recruiting.

“There is a substantial set of people who are middle-level managers and slightly above, but we don’t know who they are. They aren’t high enough to make it into the ’who is who,’ but at the same time they have high-enough positions in their companies that they cannot advertise themselves as looking for a job. In many ways, those people are kind of stuck,” Mr. Piskorski said. “LinkedIn has literally freed those people. The way it’s done that is, it’s sort of allowed people to advertise themselves on the market, say, ’Hey, here I am, not explicitly looking for a job, but I’m willing to entertain offers.’ ”

LinkedIn, formed in 2003, took several years to build its membership base, Ms. Luo said. Different from traditional job boards such as Monster.com or CareerBuilder.com, the company’s closest competitor is probably Jobster.com, a site that also incorporates user profiles and people searches.

But unlike LinkedIn, which emphasizes “trusted contacts” and thus charges users a fee to connect to people outside their networks, Jobster lets members add any user as a contact.

“The Catch-22 about a professional network site is, until you have a critical mass of users, you’re not useful,” Ms. Luo said. “We spent a lot of time on building the network, and now we’re building applications on top of the network.”

One such application is the company’s new “Answers” feature that invites members to solicit advice from other users. In one recent thread, Gordon Whyte, a chief operations officer at British firm Startburst Solar, posted a question asking members what five actions they would take in the first 100 days of leadership at a new company.

Mr. Piskorski said features like “Answers” should be the company’s focus in the future.

“Where I see them going next is to sort of focus more and more on helping people use their networks much more frequently,” he said. “The biggest competitor to LinkedIn is reality. For a site like LinkedIn to be successful, it has to identify where offline networks go wrong.”