This week, LinkedIn revealed a new tool called “Apply with LinkedIn”. It’s basically a button companies can put on their websites to enable one-click job applications by potential candidates.

“We’ve put an incredible amount of effort to rethink the job application process from end-to-end to make it a one-click submit for any professional,” says LinkedIn’s Jonathan Seitel. “The first step was simple: put the functionality everywhere our members need it. That means packaging it as a simple button that you can recognize anywhere across the web. We’ve made this simple enough to implement so both  companies and developers can easily include it on their corporate websites.”

Jobvite, which also has a social recruiting solution that lets companies use LinkedIn for applications, conducted some surveys of job seekers, customers, and HR people, and shared the following stats with us:

• 87% of U.S. companies use LinkedIn to recruit 
• Almost half (45%) of all recruiters said they ALWAYS look at candidate’s social profiles 
• 73% of all social hires on Jobvite come via LinkedIn
• Another 29% occasionally search for the online profiles of candidates.
• One in three job seekers have LinkedIn profiles 
• 58% of companies compete for talent by sourcing passive candidates – who may not have a current resume

“LinkedIn’s move will make the use of social profiles in job seeking and hiring even more popular – which could appeal to the 53% of the workforce that are open to a new job but not actively looking,” a representative for Jobvite tells WebProNews.

Jobvite also provided the following infographic on “The State of Social Recruiting”. Pretty interesting.

A recent study from Performics found that 59% of social networks consider LinkedIn to be their most important social network. “Obviously, we have a lot of individuals out there looking for jobs, or they’re looking to change jobs; and they’re understanding that they need to embrace social networks like LinkedIn in order to help facilitate that search,” Performics CEO Daina Middleton told WebProNews in a recent interview:

Google+ has quickly proven itself to be a viable social network, and the Circles feature is pretty useful for professional contacts and keeping them separate from non-professional contacts. It will be quite interesting to see how Google+ impacts the newly public LinkedIn, particularly as it rolls out its business profiles.