You know what I hate? Technology for technology sake. You know what I love? When technology comes along and solves a majore pain point by being smart and anticipating my needs. Guess who just did the latter (okay smarty pants, you knew the answer already because I gave it away in the title). Yup, LinkedIn.

I’ve been a fan of LinkedIn for a while and if my recollection is correct, I’ve been a member since 2003 which is a long time in the life of a social network. While I originally liked LinkedIn for it’s ability to connect me to other smart business folks, the functionality was pretty flat beyond being an online repository for resumes for the first 5-6 years. Over the last 18 months, they’ve really ramped up their efforts and have made the site much more social in nature.

This morning, they ratcheted things up on more notch by offering a great feature which essentially automates the matchmaking around forwarding on job recommendations. Here is a screenshot of the e-mail I received from LinkedIn this morning:

For any of you reading this in an RSS reader without graphic capabilities, essentially the new LinkedIn functionality works this way:

• Person A pings me with a job request
• LinkedIn looks through my contacts for people that have that job description in their current or past history
• I am then offered the ability to forward that description onto my network (see e-mail template on LinkedIn below).
• Even better, LinkedIn looks into the connections of my connections and offers to allow my connections to forward this description onto their network thus adding value for me AND my network.