You don’t have a huge network on LinkedIn, doesn’t really matter…

LinkedIn is a great social media. 161 million users in February 2012. Full of professional people. A great place to be for sourcers. (source: http://press.linkedin.com/about)

Building a network is a long process, and if you want to play by the LinkedIn rule, you add onto your network only people you should know.

I’ll write something on how to build a network soon.

LinkedIn search engine is good with plenty of possibility to refine your search results. But, the number of result is directly linked to the size of your network. So if you’ve got only 1 connection, you will not go far…

But, and here the trick, LinkedIn allows us to have a public profile. That means that your profile (or part of it, you can decide) will appear on Google, Yahoo!, Bing and so on.

More info on Public Profile: http://help.linkedin.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/83

So, even if you don’t have a linkedIn account, you can find people thanks to Google.

If you try java developer site:linkedin.com on the Google query field you will have 2.6 million + results. But part of those results aren’t relevant as, if we have a closer look to LinkedIn address composition, you will have some uk.linkedin.com/jobs/

To search only on Public Profile, you will need to search for java developer site:linkedin.com/in/ 
Thanks to Katharine Robinson, you can actually search as well with /pub/ instead of /in/.

We can notice as well that LinkedIn use the country code as a “pre-fix” on their address.

So you can refine with java developer site:uk.linkedin.com/in/ that will return only UK profile!