As I was traveling through the airport in Boston a couple of weeks ago, I found a Fortune magazine (April 12, 2010 Magazine Date) that had a headline on the front that said, “FIRE UP YOUR CAREER!  Right Now, Millions of Americans are Using LinkedIn to Find Jobs and Get Ahead.  Do They Know Something You Don’t?”  This caught my attention so I mustard up the hefty price of $4.99 plus tax and bought the magazine.  When I got on my flight from Boston to Denver I began to read the article that captured my attention and wallet.

The article summarized the intent of LinkedIn and how the profile page works as well as the growth of the company.  Some interesting statistics that were highlighted included:

- Accenture’s head of global recruiting plans on recruiting 40% of his hires in the next few years using “social media” (i.e. social recruiting)

- Visitors to LinkedIn have jumped 31% from last year to 17.6 million

- The average user is a college-educated, 43 years old, making $107,000

- Cost savings is a major motivation for companies looking to bypass the big headhunting firms

- Belhaven University in Houston is now teaching students to tap into their network from social media to get exposure.

All of these interesting discussions got me thinking about college students and the drawbacks of LinkedIn.  For starters the average user is 43 years old making $107,000.  As a guess, I would say that the average age of undergraduates is probably somewhere between 19-22 and they are making somewhere less than $20,000 a year and most likely unemployed.  While I don’t have actual numbers and studies to back up those numbers, I can draw from my experiences with my peers when I was in college 5 years ago.  Nevertheless, the target audience with LinkedIn is a broad user group and isn’t refined for college students looking for career advice or connecting with a professional for informal advice.  I equate the comparison of LinkedIn to UGrowU with the comparison of Monster and The Ladders.  LinkedIn and Monster are broad solutions that cover a wide range of users where as UGrowU and The Ladders have a solution that is more refined to a specific targeted audience.  It should be noted that Monster and The Ladders are “job boards” where basically a job is posted and people apply for jobs which is similar to looking in the classifieds section of the newspaper for job postings.  LinkedIn and UGrowU are in a different growing market which termed social recruiting and contains features far more advanced than a job board.

In summary, the article was both educational and interesting.  The current success of LinkedIn is proving that the market for social media/social recruiting is growing and being used more now than ever before.  The fascinating thing about LinkedIn is the fact that they’ve been pulling in cash since 2005 and have been profitable since 2007.  With the combination of a growing market and money being made, this market looks to be very successful and doesn’t appear to be disappearing anytime soon.