LinkedIn has unveiled a new product called Talent Pipeline, which aims to help recruiters manage job candidates from a variety of sources and hire the best talent more quickly.

With social networking services and social media becoming more prominent, there are more and more ways for recruiters to find sources of talent who may not be actively looking for a new job. These services exist alongside more traditional means of finding talent, such as referrals, job boards, conferences and career websites. This large pool of potential job candidates can be daunting for recruiters and so LinkedIn has launched Talent Pipeline to help them keep track of all potential candidates in a single location — even before those candidates have begun the formal application process.

As many passive candidates will not have applied for a job, they will not show up in a company’s applicant tracking system, which means that recruiters may have to resort to other methods to keep tabs on passive candidates. This is a problem that LinkedIn hopes to resolve with Talent Pipeline, which will also allow recruiters to maintain up-to-date information on candidates more easily.

You’ll be able to import talent leads and resumes from a variety of sources into the LinkedIn Recruiter platform, which is being extended through Talent Pipeline. You can search these records, add additional information and share those records with fellow recruiters just like you would do with any profile on LinkedIn.

When you import a new lead, that information is connected with the candidate’s LinkedIn profile — something that many people keep up-to-date even when they are not actively looking looking for a new job. This will help you evaluate and build relationships with potential candidates, using LinkedIn data such as shared connections, activity updates, recommendations and shared groups.

LinkedIn has teamed up with recruiters from several large companies to develop Talent Pipeline, including PepsiCo, Pfizer, Red Hat, First Citizens Bank and Netflix.

LinkedIn, which has more than 120 million members, has been on a roll lately. It has acquired real-time search provider IndexTank and contact management service Connected this month alone.

Talent Pipeline will be launched early next year and the core functionality will be made available at no extra cost to those using LinkedIn Recruiter. Talent Pipeline will also be available to recruitment team members who are not using Recruiter.