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Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn’s Founder and CEO, was on Charlie Rose a couple of weeks ago. I’ve been meaning to give it a watch since I saw it on Techcrunch, and I was not disappointed. keep reading…

What would you pay to get a job opening before a group of the very people you’re looking to hire? How about free?

LinkedIn is now allowing group members to post job openings at no charge. The jobs are separate from the group discussions and have their own channel. Only other members of the group have access to the jobs, so while that reduces the overall visibility, it makes it possible to highly target job openings.

If LinkedIn announced this feature anywhere, we missed it. Nor could we find anyplace on the site itself explaining how it works. What it looks like, though, is the job posting rules are the same as participating in a discussion. Only members of a group can post a job. And the jobs aren’t included in the main, fee-based job board.

So this looks to us like more of an opportunity for specialty recruiters already participating in groups where they fish. It’s also likely that recruiters may start joining more groups.

We suspect that eventually LinkedIn will open up the group job boards to anyone for a fee. But that’s just a guess.

Jobvite, the e-recruitment provider that emphasizes collaborative hiring, is releasing a new LinkedIn and Facebook interface today. Now, Jobvite users not only can forward company openings to their friends and connections, but they’ll know who among them is the best match for each position.

That alone makes the announcement news, but this is a game-changer. Even more important than the access it gives recruiters to two of the largest networks in the world, is the validation Jobvite is bringing to all those predictions about the value of social networks as a recruiting tool.

No need to point out that recruiters discovered social networks almost as soon as they came along. That’s true enough, but consider how they’ve been used for recruiting. It’s mostly been a passive exercise with Facebook and MySpace widgets enabling a company’s jobs to appear on individual pages. LinkedIn and others of its kind have been mostly a source of leads.

In the one instance, the social networks are little more than a job board in new clothes. In the latter case, it requires active recruiter time to source candidates, more targeted perhaps, but functionally not a whole different from using Google or Yahoo or other research tools. As recently as last summer Kevin Wheeler was predicting that eventually social networks “will become core to good recruiting and talent management,” though he called them “over-hyped and poorly used at the moment.”

Jobvite’s announcement today, and last week’s from Appirio, are bringing us closer to realizing as practice what Wheeler astutely saw as a trend. What the new tools from both companies do is to leverage social networks in a directed manner. Where referral programs pioneered by the likes of companies such as Jobster (site; profile) scattered job opening announcements like seeds in the wind, Jobvite and Appirio tell participating employees who among their contacts would be a best fit. Forwarding the opening is still up to the employee, but at least it won’t be an address-book dump. keep reading…

We ran a webinar today with Elaine Orler and Jason Corsello of Knowledge Infusion about what changes we should expect from recruiting technology in the next year.

I learned a lot on the call, but one of the polls that we took really made me stop and think. Here it is:

keep reading…