Recruiters who use the online business network LinkedIn to find talent are likely to benefit from a growing UK candidate pool, following the network's expansion into Europe and the opening of a London office.

Elisabeth O'Donnell, LinkedIn international director, told Recruiter that the office will focus on accelerating the growth of membership in the UK and the rest of Europe, where it already has five million members. She said that although she only had anecdotal evidence of how useful UK recruiters find the network for domestic sourcing, those she had spoken to said it had already changed the way they did business.

"We have approximately 22,000 UK members who self-classify in the 'staffing and recruiting' industry, but this is an under-representation of the number of recruiters on the site. There are thousands more recruiters who will classify themselves as consultants, in the finance industry, for example, but who work for one of the major executive recruitment agencies," she said. "Our rate of growth among recruiters has pretty much kept pace with the rate of overall member growth."

LinkedIn's total UK membership passed the one million mark in October and the membership is particularly strong in areas such as IT, financial services, marketing and advertising. O'Donnell adds that a local office will help it better understand UK and European customer needs and enable it to feed information back to its product teams for future development.

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