For those restaurant managers out there who are not establishing a business network on LinkedIn yet, read on.

Many restaurant managers have discovered the efficacy using the site to develop business connections, as evidenced by the number of “Invitations to Connect” I receive almost daily. There are some 17 million members on LinkedIn currently and the number is growing by leaps and bounds. LinkedIn is an amazing networking tool for opening doors to opportunities otherwise unreachable.

LinkedIn is a business version of the ever-popular MySpace or Facebook social networking sites, geared toward experienced professionals. According to LinkedIn’s CEO Dan Nye, the average age of LinkedIn users is 41, and they have an income of over $51,000.

Note: Many corporate and third-party recruiters are using LinkedIn because top talent is to be found in its membership.

The main tool of LinkedIn is your personal profile - a resume webpage of sorts. You decide how public your profile is, having it appear on Google and Yahoo searches if you’d like. This self-summary of your professional experience helps you to find and be found by colleagues, clients, and partners. Your profile can also include recommendations written by or for your connections. You may list your current company, location, skill set, industry, title, professional organizations you belong to, and where you’ve previously worked and attended school. You add connections to your profile by inviting trusted contacts to join LinkedIn and connect to you, and by accepting invitations from others, allowing for mutual access to one another’s LinkedIn contacts.

In my own personal LinkedIn network, there are 6,813,100+ conections, whose names and bios I can see because they fall within my extended network, which reaches to three degrees of separation from me (my LinkedIn connections, my connections’ contacts, and the people they know). If I do a quick search on LinkedIn specifying the current title “manager” and the industry “restaurant”, my search reveals 500+ names and bios in my extended network, plus 20 search results of others outside my network whose companies and titles I can see but with no names. You can see how it would take a lot of old-fashioned networking and exchanging of business cards (and way too much time) to tap into that kind of list, and the bios have much more data than could ever fit on a business card.

The bios found when conducting a search can result in potential clients, recruits, service providers, subject experts, and partners while gaining more exposure for yourself and your company. Every user specifies their interests for being on LinkedIn, (i.e. career opportunities, consulting offers, new ventures, job inquiries, expertise requests, business deals, reference requests, or getting back in touch), so you can even better determine their viability as a connection.

It’s free to search the site, create a personal profile, link to others and take advantage of many of its features. Paid accounts offer expanded capabilities to contact other users and view search results.

Don’t miss the boat on this one. Profesionally, as a restaurant manager, you want to have this type of resource working for you. To grow and leverage your LinkedIn network, you can link to me by going to LinkedIn.com and from your own profile, email me an invitation to connect at bbruce.linkedin@gmail.com .

Author's Bio: 

Brian Bruce is an Executive Restaurant Recruiter and Blogger with 23 years operations experience. His vast knowledge of the industry comes from many years managing in national concepts such as Chili’s and Joe’s Crab Shack. He understands the day-to-day challenges from both sides of the equation, as a client trying to find quality operations candidates and as a management candidate trying to find a quality employer. He can be contacted at bbruce.linkedin@gmail.com .