They are very busy, presumably trying to make the site and its services more social – which is always good. LinkedIn recently launched new features for LinkedIn groups. And it does look very cool and promising.

Like Facebook, they have added a ‘Like’ function (pardon the pun), including several other ways of sharing content within groups, following group members and engaging more with other LinkedIn members.

I think that the groups, and of course the LinkedIn Answers will continue to play a part in LinkeIn’s efforts to make the site more sociable, potentially gearing it towards a full fledged Social recruiting service, in the not so distant future.

The video below demonstrates the features of the new LinkedIn groups.

Recruitment Agencies have also attracted high calibre candidates from using the Social Media site and recruiters who have been consistently hiring via LinkedIn, tend to fill a lot of their jobs faster or get referals from connections.

Last week, Microsoft announced that they saved £60,000 of recruitment costs from using LinkedIn.

According to ComputerWeekly:

LinkedIn’s business value was highlighted when Microsoft asked a member of its IT recruitment staff to put together a team to reverse-engineer viruses.

Microsoft saved an estimated £60,000 and was able to source candidates with specialist IT skills from across Europe.

Declan Fitzgerald, IT recruiter at Microsoft, said he had to find nine techies with skills in the rare Assembly and X86 software languages.

He said through normal methods such as advertising and recruitment firms he would have struggled to find people with these niche skills. But through LinkedIn searches he filled seven out of nine positions.

Actually, the £60,000 saved was in direct recruitment company fees. At the moment, LinkedIn gets one million new members every 17 days and has 10 million members in Europe.

Other major recruitment cost savings mentioned are that of Indian IT supplier HCL which has saved £300,000 in recruitment fees in a year, and brewer SAB Miller saved £1.2m in a year in recruitment fees by employing 120 people directly from LinkedIn.

While this trend is quite common within the IT recruitment industry, it will be interesting to get some real time statistics of cost savings from other major recruitment industry sectors.

From my recruitment experience, I have found and placed great candidates from using LinkedIn in diverse sectors and welcome recruiters and professionals to connect with me on LinkedIn.

The event itself presented this intro:

Social media is rapidly becoming more than just another tool in a recruiter’s toolbox — it’s an important part of the future of the talent acquisition profession. On June 15, 225 recruiting industry professionals got together at Google’s World HQ in Mountain View, CA, and thousands more participated in a live stream and online chat to learn and discuss what has worked, what has been tried and what can be done to capitalize on these incredibly powerful tools for our industry.

This first of its kind, sold-out event brought together recruiting’s best and brightest for a hybrid between a conference and an unconference. With only part of the agenda set (and even those sessions included only a 15-20 minute presentation).

The goal of the Social Recruiting Summit is to have an industry conversation about these tools, talk about tactics and strategies that are already in the field and working, not pie-in-the-sky ideas.

There are quite a few videos online that shows notable speakers presenting how Social Media can add great value to Recruiting.

A very insighful blogpost by Michael Specht who attended the even from Australia can be found here. As well as Matt Alder from the UK. Looking through the list of attendees are the COO and the Marketing Director Jobsite UK. Damian McCallion twittered about the trip to Keith Potts.

Interestingly, a sort of similar event is being planned for London, called Social Media Recruitment – organized by Web Based Recruitment.

It is for July 16th, and I will see if I can arrange to be there. Hopefully.