By Charlene Li

I love it when four of my coverage areas converge -- in this case, online recruitment, vertical search, local search, and social networking (whew). The busy folks at LinkedIn announced jointly a partnership with Simply Hired that should help both of them gain traction in a their respective spaces. LinkedIn also announced LinkedIn Services. Let me take them one by one.

Simply Hired offers a vertical "meta-job" search engine that spiders job boards like Monster.com and aggregates all of the listings into one large index -- their biggest competitor in the space is Indeed.com. Do a search on marketing analyst in San Francisco and you get loads of results from Monster, Craig's List, and America's Job Bank (just to name a few). When you do a search, you can see if any of your contacts work at the company through a link to LinkedIn. So I could see that for a marketing job at E-Loan, I had 19 connections in my network, most of them at least three degrees away. But it still beats sending out a resume into the big, dark void of a recruiter's inbox. LinkedIn will also offer Simply Hired jobs in its jobs directory, probably by the end of May.

In another area, LinkedIn also announced LinkedIn Services, where users can find recommendations for services such as lawyers, financial advisers, accountants, etc. The secret sauce that makes this work over similar services from Insider Pages, Judy's Book and Yelp! -- a built-in social network that already has tons of testimonials and endorsers. While Yahoo! 360 may be better at getting reviews from its users for restaurants, professional services require a higher level of confidence and referral information, which LinkedIn can provide.

So congrats to LinkedIn, which continues to innovate. Now, let's see how well they can monetize all of these great assets -- the proof will be in the pudding when they are able to charge companies for job postings and premium service listings (anticipated in later in 2005).