As companies turn to the web to mine for prospective job candidates, it’s no longer advantageous to refrain from broadcasting personal information. Instead, the new imperative is to present your professional skills as attractively as possible, packing your profile with keywords (marketing manager, global sourcing specialist) that will send your name to the top of recruiters’ searches.

At the same time, you can connect your online professional interactions in one place, joining groups on the site (LinkedIn has more than 500,000 of them, based on companies, schools, and affinities), offering advice, and linking your Twitter account and blog updates to your profile.

From elsewhere in the article:

More than 60 million members have logged on to create profiles, upload their employment histories, and build connections with people they know. Visitors to the site have jumped 31% from last year to 17.6 million in February. They include your customers. Your colleagues. Your competitors. Your boss. And being on LinkedIn puts you in the company of people with impressive credentials: The average member is a college-educated 43-year-old making $107,000. More than a quarter are senior executives. Every Fortune 500 company is represented. That’s why recruiters rely on the site to find even the highest-caliber executives: Oracle (ORCL, Fortune 500) found CFO Jeff Epstein via LinkedIn in 2008.

According to Dr. Robert Cross, a professor of management at the University of Virginia, the high performers in an organization focus on building high-quality social networks rather than large ones.

From a 2006 paper (.pdf) co-authored by Rob Cross:

Most high performers succeed by developing targeted networks that extend their abilities. Rather than simply adding more and more people to their Rolodex, rising stars need…to know how to increase and decrease connectivity in ways that enhance productivity and performance.

…high performers in our research were selective in initiating relationships that extended their abilities. When they reached out to others — including to people they didn’t know — they did so with a clear and well-articulated reason for connecting.

…perhaps most important, our high performers were avid learners.

21st-century schools should integrate new technologies for learning and create personalized structures for supporting students.

…Also key is the creation of networks that allow teachers, leaders, schools and districts to learn from one another.

…Although it would be romantic to assume that massive change can come exclusively from school-to-school networking, the power of learning systems has proven to be stronger than the power of mandates to transform schools.

In no small part, the markets described on this site are designed to expedite the build-out of such networks. For details, see the Jobs Quickly page.

“First, they are easy to update…This allows people to, in the words of blog pioneer Dave Winer, ‘narrate their work’…”

“Enterprises have long realized both the value of converting potential ties into actual ones…”