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If you’ve been thinking about using LinkedIn to build your professional career, you’ll be glad to know there’s a Dummies book for LinkedIn now!

LinkedIn For Dummies by Joel Elad will tell you everything you need to know about LinkedIn, in language you can understand. It is filled with screen shots, lists, and detailed instructions for doing everything from signing up and creating a profile to finding venture capitalists and angel investors to fund your startup.

Yes, you can even look for business financing on LinkedIn. The Answers section of LinkedIn has two appropriate categories for this topic — Startups and Small Business, and Venture Capital and Private Equity.

And if you’re looking for venture capital for your startup, you can even use LinkedIn to find experienced professionals for your “dream team.” With tens of millions of experienced professional members, LinkedIn should be the first resource you use to recruit a management team.

You May Have to Pay

There’s just one problem. In order to use many of the advanced features of LinkedIn, you have to pay. And some of the paid plans are quite expensive.

For example, the free version of LinkedIn, which is called the Basic Plan, only allows you to communicate with people who are in your network. And only one, two, or three degrees away from you. You can’t communicate with people outside your network and you can’t even see their full profile. All you see is their name and a list of their job titles and educational degrees.

And the cheapest paid LinkedIn plan is $250 a year. But on this plan, you can only contact three people outside your network per month. If you want to contact more people per month, you have to upgrade to a more expensive plan.

So it seems clear who LinkedIn is targeting their services to — large companies who are looking for employees. These companies can afford to pay thousands of dollars a year to search for people using specifically targeted keywords. They can see everyone’s full profile, even if the person is not in their network.

But for job-hunters, it’s a different story. Unless you’re willing to pay hundreds of dollars a year, you won’t be able to do very much on LinkedIn.

What You Can Do For Free

On the Basic plan, you can create a detailed profile, join groups, and build a network. You can post questions and answers. You can get daily updates from your network and your groups. And you can search for people and companies.

But your search may turn up very limited results. You can only see a detailed profile of the people in your network.

Suppose, for example, you hear about a company that has an opening for which you’re qualified. You may have posted your resume on Monster, HotJobs, CareerBuilder, etc. The whole point of networking is to find someone in your personal network who knows someone at that company.

So you might start by searching for the company on LinkedIn. Once you find it, you can see a list of their employees who are on LinkedIn. And theoretically, you could find employees who are in your network and use that connection to get your foot in the door.

I said “theoretically” for a reason. There are two major problems with this scenario. Many employees don’t include their name in their profile. Just their job title. And without a name, you can’t see any connections.

It’s possible that many companies don’t allow their employees to reveal personal information on LinkedIn. Or employees don’t want their employer to know they’re job-hunting.

The second problem? On the Basic Plan, you won’t even be able to see many of the company’s employees. Instead, you’ll see a dozen or so, and then a large button that says, “Upgrade to See More Employees.”

My Experience With the Basic Plan

I know this from personal experience. Because I’m an independent contractor, I tried to use this technique to find clients. I know which job titles in my target market are likely to be the “ultimate decision maker.” And I already had a list of companies in my target market.

So I thought all I had to do was pull up company employees, find the right people by job title, and see if I was connected to them. Then I could use my connections to be introduced to them.

Unfortunately, I’m on the Basic plan. When I pulled up one company on LinkedIn, most of the employees listed had no personal names. Only job titles. And apparently, LinkedIn needs a personal name to connect people.

So LinkedIn couldn’t tell me if these company employees were connected to me. And I couldn’t see the full profile of any employee. I couldn’t contact them through LinkedIn, and I couldn’t get a phone number or an email address.

So on the Basic Plan, the best a job-hunter can do is create a detailed profile that is keyword optimized. And then sit back and wait for a company to contact you.

Is LinkedIn For the Fortune 500?

But a Fortune 500 company that can pay thousands of dollars a year can actively search for qualified people by keywords and use their connections to learn more about those people before they even contact them. A LinkedIn profile is much more detailed than a resume. It even has room for a picture!

So LinkedIn may be the ultimate manifestation of the phrase “Don’t call us, we’ll call you.”

In fact, LinkedIn could be thought of as a sophisticated recruiting tool for the Fortune 500, not a networking service for unemployed professionals. Maybe that’s why there are over 130,000 recruiters on LinkedIn, according to LinkedIn For Dummies.

So if you work among the Fortune 500, see my review of Joel Elad’s book, LinkedIn For Dummies, in the social media ezine, Social Media Examiner.

If you’re job-hunting, you can also benefit from the book. Just remember that you won’t be able to do very much unless you sign up for one of the paid plans.

How are you using LinkedIn? Has anyone found a job using the Basic Plan exclusively?

Feel free to post your comments.

Copyright 2010, Ruth M. Shipley

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