For the past few years, I’ve kept a running total of how people land their new jobs – an off-line process to keep the playing field level.

Interestingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, Web job sites are not the primary source of jobs for most of the job seekers I interview.  Fewer than 15% of them mention a job site (e.g. Monster, CareerBuilder, even Craigslist).

But, I’ve noticed an interesting trend recently, when Iask people how they landed their new job AND when the answer is a Web site, the Web site mentioned with increasing frequency is LinkedIn!

In an earlier post this month, I mentioned the new person-to-person interactivity now possible through the LinkedIn Groups.  For many of us, this is a more comfortable process than the other process of reaching out to quasi-strangers who happen to be a “connections” of one of our contacts.  And I’ve seen many jobs posted on the groups to which I belong.

For several years, I’ve been aware that recruiters are actively trolling through their LinkedIn networks looking for job seekers, but only met 2 people – in 2 years – who were hired through that process.  Recently the pace has definitely picked up – I’ve met 2 people in the last 2 months who connected to the new job through LinkedIn.

So check it out!