Introduction 

As the growth of professional social network systems seems unstoppable, also recruiters have discovered them. Three types of these sites can be distinguished: personal sites (Facebook, MySpace, Hyves), professional sites (Ryze, LinkedIn) and hybrid sites (Orkut, Tribe) (Wolk, 2004: 71).
Professional social network sites (SNSs) are created with the idea of ‘connecting people that know and trust each other in business’ . This clear and specific goal distinguishes them from personal SNSs, like MySpace and Facebook. Professional SNS’s are more constrained than their personal equivalents as, for example, user profiles consist mainly of items regarding profession, the number of groups that can be joined has been limited, etcetera.
This constrained structure in combination with a clear goal is likely to give professional SNSs an advantage over personal SNSs in the context of recruitment. It improves the quality of data as it controls the relevance and it enlarges the quantity of data by connecting a large number of people (Vick & Walsh, 2006). As we assume that recruiters especially use professional SNSs, in this paper, we will focus ourselves on professional SNSs.
However, does the use of professional SNSs for recruitment really create benefits for the recruitment process? The aim of to contribute to the body of knowledge concerning the possibilities of the application of SNSs in the recruitment process and link the use of professional SNSs to the structurational theory. Therefore, we will explore the conditions, the way of and reasons for use of professional SNSs.