Small business owners – if you think social networks only as a medium for your business to build brand and community, you need to explore more and expand your horizon, as 73.3% use social networks to recruit new employees, according to JobVite’s Social Recruiting Survey 2010.
I just read an article from WebProNews regarding the importance of social media in job recruitment. To say the least, reading the article makes me feel… dumbfounded.
Referring to JobVite, a cutting-edge recruiting platform site, the WebProNews article shows you a trend in job recruitment via social networks.
It’s my bad that I’m not keeping up with the trend. I know that LinkedIn is a great social network to make your portfolio stand out, but not to the scale of the JobVite survey results. Facebook has also becoming a huge ‘social job board’ today. Even worse, I don’t see the trend coming from Twitter, as a medium for job recruitment.
Here’s a fascinating trend I read:
The survey found 83 percent of respondents use or plan to use social networks for recruiting this year. LinkedIn (78%), Facebook (55%) and Twitter (45%) are the most popular social recruiting platforms…
Some other important highlights:
- 92% of those hiring in 2010 are using or plan to use social networks to hire employees.
- From the 92% above, 86% are using LinkedIn, 60% are using Facebook and 50% are using Twitter for their recruitment endeavours.
- And here’s a trend you should focus on: 50% companies plan to allocate more resources in recruitment via social networks, compared to 17% in job boards.
Why you should be riding the trend?
No matter how you hate me-too attitude, you need to follow this social recruitment trend, as it will bring you many benefits, such as:
- Cost effective – talented people are now on social media more that they are on job boards; it’s only logical to focus your effort to a place where many people spend a lot of time on.
- The power of buzz – post a job opening, get people to recommend your listing to others via Facebook’s “Like,” Twitter’s “Retweet” and such, and expect more exposure to your listing.
- Faster recruitment process – you can expect responses coming in real time; even you can start your screening process by, for example, using Facebook’s chat feature.
However, you must take heed on these pitfalls:
- Challenging background checking – despite some measures taken by social networks to ensure that ‘you are you’, some others are just faking up their profile, making accurate job applicant screening process difficult.
- Too much information – believe it or not, those talented people are only outgoing: They write and give opinion as they like (including gossiping.) While opinions are a good recruitment consideration, if your company can’t take it, you’d better think twice for social recruiting.
- Too informal and casual – social networks are casual at best; finding candidates who are serious enough to apply for your job opening could be challenging.
Go for it!
Despite everything seems so vague, be patient – there will be time when businesses and job seekers are embracing the concept of social recruiting. When this happen, you will see some best practices emerge; apply them to get the best of your company recruitment campaign.
I have done social recruitment. I think social networks are great places to find partners and employees. Despite of some time-wasting activities, including answering an inquiry from people who are only curious about what you’ve got to offer (and from some who even don’t have a clue about the offer,) I can assure you that some applicants are gems and can be the cornerstones of your success.
So, I’ll say: go for it, and make sure your efforts are laser-targeted.
What’s your view on this? Please share yours by commenting to this article.
Ivan Widjaya
Social recruitment
Image by brokenarts