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What’s easy: knowing you need a passive candidate recruiting strategy to acquire top talent. What’s difficult: securing the resources necessary to actually define and implement that strategy.

So, how do you make the case? We asked LinkedIn Recruitment Product Consulting Manager Mark Freeman, who advises customers on how to maximize their LinkedIn investment.  Through his extensive experience as both recruiter and consultant, Mark has worked with companies in all stages of passive candidate recruiting adoption. Below he offers advice on how to sell the need for recruiting passive talent in the first place, and how to measure and track its effectiveness.

Hiring in technology is tough: it’s that simple. Like many recruiters sourcing for candidates with unique skill sets, I’m always looking for ways to speed up the process without sacrificing on quality. And because I can have as many as 40 active requisitions at a time, I need not only speed, but also a real ability to scale.

Between July and August of 2010 I found myself in a sourcing dilemma. I was supporting the Web Development team here at LinkedIn, who needed to immediately fill several engineering positions to ensure an on-time delivery of essential projects. These requisitions weren’t for just any engineer: we needed experienced professionals who had object-oriented JavaScript skills, within the context of a high-traffic consumer website—a complex skill set that many web developers simply don’t possess. To make things more difficult, several other high-profile technology companies in the Bay Area were looking for that exact type of talent, so an already small candidate pool was getting smaller by the day.

In early June 2010, I logged in to LinkedIn to confirm some connection invites and I was greeted by a new site feature called “Jobs You May Be Interested In”.

As an HR professional,  I have closely followed the progress of LinkedIn and am always excited to see the rollout of new features to optimize the recruiting experience. At the time I was happily employed as a Human Resources Manager with Hewlett-Packard in San Diego, CA. I was not actively looking for a job, I found my work interesting, and I felt like I had great prospects for growth and development at HP.

One question we often hear from our Corporate Recruiting Solutions customers is: how does LinkedIn think about member engagement? We sat down with Allen Blue, LinkedIn co-founder and VP of Product Management, to get his perspectives.

Where do you get the ideas for products that LinkedIn members will love and come back for?