INBOX:ONLINE NETWORKING was the next hot thing on the internet a few years ago with the rise of Facebook and MySpace. But in the business world, there is a key player that is worth getting into if you want to boost your career or hire good people: LinkedIn.com

Here are a few tips on how to get the most out of this network to help your business. LinkedIn is a great tool for finding job candidates who might not be interested in a job right now, but who would like to be offered a job they might jump at. This is its little-discussed aspect of the site. For starters, people would not publish their profiles unless they were interested in new opportunities. So, using the “advanced search” tool, you can find people in your extended network who are potential candidates for your search, or who may in fact know someone who is.

Being able to see the names and biographies of people in your extended network means you can pretty easily call them or e-mail them for recruitment purposes.

Since the average person has around 200 people in their network, extended to three degrees of separation means you can reach a lot of people. Since people can also endorse other people they like, you can mention these endorsements if you contact someone.

However, remember that making a cold call to someone you don’t know usually doesn’t work. It is better to pre-qualify them in some way by checking with the person who connects you. You can also use Google to search the public profiles on LinkedIn since many people have made their LinkedIn profile public.

You can also improve your “connectability” by filling out your profile like it is an executive bio, so include past companies, education, affiliations and activities. That creates a much better online CV. Then create a public profile and select “full view” so Google – and other people – can find it.

Also, instead of using the default URL, customise your public profile’s URL to be your actual name – it looks a lot slicker and then you can use it in e-mails.

If you have a candidate who is on LinkedIn, you can check their references by putting in the company name they worked for and the years that the person worked there.

Your search will find the people who worked at the company during the same time period, who might be the candidate’s former colleagues. What about checking your prospective boss’s references? Plug in their name and see if they have any glowing endorsements. If they don’t, that might help you to decide whether to take the job or not.

Getting a job recently vacated by someone else? Find the person who used to have the job that you’re interviewing for. Searching for job title and company, but uncheck “current titles only”.

You can try to contact the person who used to hold the position and get the inside scoop on the job. Want to look good in the job interview? You can use LinkedIn to find out the hobbies of the people that you’re meeting, assuming they filled this part out!

One of the best uses of LinkedIn is asking for advice. LinkedIn Answers allows you to broadcast your business-related questions to both your network and the greater LinkedIn network.

You should get better answers from people connected to you than just throwing it out to anyone. But remember to only use this once in a while – it gets annoying otherwise.