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The most severe economic downturn in recent memory has helped boost a powerful tool for people looking to hire a new employee, find a job or do their current job better, say local proponents of the networking Web site LinkedIn.com.

“It really provided me the reach that I wanted to have,” said Chris Paul, 42, a former Summerfield resident who used LinkedIn to find a job in Columbia, S.C., after being laid off from Hanesbrands in Winston-Salem.

While the growth of other social-networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook has leveled off, the blog TechCrunch reported earlier this year that “LinkedIn continues to grow like a weed, adding a million new registered users every 17 days.” The Triangle greatly outpaces the Triad in terms of LinkedIn users, says Greg Bowman, one of the founders of Linking Greensboro, a local LinkedIn group.

According to his research, there are approximately 60,000 users in the Greensboro area, compared to about 200,000 users in the Raleigh area, but Bowman is doing everything he can to boost Greensboro’s numbers. His group has begun to move beyond the online world and host events where people can get together in person to network. The first Linking Greensboro event in May drew more than 150 people. The next meeting is scheduled for July 28 at Studio B on Elm Street in downtown Greensboro. Bowman, a Greensboro native who moved back to the Gate City from Cary in 2008, has personally connected with more than 5,000 people on LinkedIn.

“A good majority of those are in Greensboro,” said Bowman, 36, a division director with Robert Half International, a specialized staffing services agency. “I really pride myself in really being able to reach out to people. I don’t care about reaching out to people all over the world — I care about reaching out to people in my own backyard.”

While people use a variety of social-networking sites for business and personal use, including Facebook and Twitter, some of the most active local users say LinkedIn has emerged as the most serious professional tool of the bunch.

“LinkedIn to me is like the board room,” said Danielle Hatfield, 35, owner of a namesake marketing and design company and art coordinator for Studio B. “That’s where you really get down to business. It’s very serious connections. Because it is so structured, I think it offers a greater appeal to the older professionals, because it doesn’t seem like it has all that fluff that Facebook or Twitter does.”

Paul appreciated the serious connections he made through LinkedIn after Hanesbrands downsized and eliminated his position at the end of 2008.

“I found that all of my interviews came through LinkedIn networking,” he said. “I was probably a high-end user, but I got in touch with recruiters and hiring managers through this vehicle. All my interviews came through there.”

About two months ago LinkedIn helped him hook a job as senior planning manager for Pure Fishing, a conglomerate of companies that make fishing supplies. Before he moved to South Carolina, Paul did a lot of work with the Reemployment Support Group at St. Paul the Apostle Catholic Church in Greensboro, helping members create profiles and get started on LinkedIn.

“This was my opportunity to really help people at the church,” he said. “I felt that it was really important to get the word out on the Internet. Not everybody who has used it has landed jobs through it, but it got their job campaign in line and gave them a sense of purpose.”

The co-founder of Linking Greensboro characterizes LinkedIn as a less-exclusive version of the system that brought together an earlier generation of businesspeople.

“My dad wasn’t part of a country club,” said Tommy Riggins, 41, an account executive at Dynamic Quest, a Greensboro company that provides IT services, marketing and software development. “I didn’t go to Harvard. I didn’t have that kind of network growing up. I wasn’t part of that good-old-boy network. So I started out the old-fashioned way, just getting out and building something by pounding the streets. Now you can connect with people, start meeting people in ways you never could in the old days.”

David Moff, the CEO of a Greensboro company that provides human resources services, says social-networking sites are also a good way for employers to connect with job seekers. In March his company, The HR Group, created a LinkedIn group called Job Safari, which now has more than 250 members.

“It’s for people hunting for jobs in the employment jungle,” said Moff, 60. “These are all people we’ve met at job fairs, or they called me and said they’re looking for a job and I told them to join this group.”

Moff posts résumé and other job-hunting tips on the group’s site. While he acknowledges that the group is “a bit of a marketing tool” for The HR Group, he sees Job Safari as primarily a public service.

“Some of them are starting to talk to each other,” he said. “I’m hoping to create a virtual job network.”

LinkedIn didn’t start out as a job-hunting tool, but hard economic times have driven it in that direction, according to Paul.

“The CEO of LinkedIn developed the concept as a powerful system where people could go and ask any business question they wanted and get an answer,” he said. “It wasn’t necessarily geared toward job seekers, but it really exploded this past quarter.”

Contact Eddie Huffman at 373-7335 or eddie.huffman@news-record.com.