Here is proof that social recruiting is right here, right now!
While social media is everywhere, it is still very subjective. Just because you are told / guided / influenced / advised [delete accordingly] to 'do social' in a particular way, doesn't mean it is going to work for you or your company. Different audiences react to different stimuli.
When we talk about social media in recruitment - aka social recruiting - this becomes both important and necessary to understand.
Just because you have all the social media channels to hand, doesn't mean you have to use them. If you know your audience is looking for jobs in the newspapers and trade magazines then it makes sense to go there to recruit - in Sweden, for example, I found out when I spoke at a conference there earlier this year, that 65% of people use print as the primary job seeking tool! Amazing I know in the online world!
The crux here is knowing your audience. Do you know where your job seeking audience resides? Offline or online? LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter or in niche networks on places like Ning? Well fortunately, those research gurus at PotentialPark have come up with some really interesting and revealing proof regarding how job seekers view social media and social networks from a job seeking perspective.
PotentialPark researched 30,000 job seekers (20,000 Europe based and 10,000 Global) which gives a fantastic sample size to base look at the trends.
The first slide looks at the different sources of online sources of career information:
As you would expect from a search engine dependant population, they come top. But you can see the increases and decreases of the traditional approaches - job boards and career portals decreasing while the social channels are increasing.
[Obviously job boards and career portals still have a large share here, so they are still very important for companies to use. But the trend to want other things like social is my point here.]
The second slide examines the social networks, like Facebook, Twitter, Orkut etc against the professional networks such as LinkedIn, Xing etc.
For me this is where it starts to get really interesting (especially remembering the sample size in this research!).
With regards to the professional networks like LinkedIn, it is no surprise to see them very strong in all the areas above - after all these networks are heavily used for both recruiting/sourcing and job seeking. But the social networks are gaining on them!
If your company is still stuck in the dark ages, and still haven't realised that candidates are using social networks to find you, find out what it is like to work for your and find your jobs - then maybe it is time you wake up and realise we are now in the 21st century!
Your audience - potential employees of your company - are regularly using social media to find out about working for your company. But what are you doing about it?
So taking this down into a more detailed look at how these job seekers actually interact with employers:
No surprise here that career sites are the top choice here, and they should be of course. But what is interesting here is the range of other social media options the job seekers are now using for enagagement. Even Twitter is now seen as a credible engagement channel with 9% of the vote - and this will only increase in my opinion. Two other channels - blogs and multimedia - are considered as engagement channels by candidates.
The questions I would ask is this; candidates/job seekers may well see these three engagement channels as ways of interacting with employers - but do employers feel the same way? Are they still playing it the 'traditional' way?
This fantastic research by PotentialPark confirms for me, that recruitment audiences (candidates, job seekers etc) worldwide are fast embracing social media as a credible tool in their search for jobs. I just hope that companies understand the importance of this for their future talent acquisition strategies.
I would like to thank PotentialPark for sharing this information with me, and if you would like to learn more about this survey click here .
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Comments 3
StephenTurnock
Thanks Andy some interesting insights and as you say, a sizable sample unlike so many others.
For me the shift is clear but the naysayers in denial are still very much operating in the traditional sense - at least for many recruitment business & or Agency sides, where existing revenue streams are rooted in traditional post/pray sourcing. Naysayers through fear and protectionism alone is not a justifiable argument in any business strategy as that would be just refusing to wake up and smell the social coffee and see the facts as to where their audience shifts. For any business, it must take note of trends, threats and opportunity ~ so to ignore anything that measures high as far as those indicators are evident, and for them not to be part of talent acquisition strategy, will those players even come into the future?
Are most recruiters afraid of socialrecruiting? That’s Strange for people businesses! ..but many transactional recruiters don’t play the ‘engagement’ game, even in Recruitment V1.0 landscapes nor venture beyond the ‘active’ jobseekers. Many of those recruiters have not seen anything beyond the JobBoard models of circa 1996 to present. Alas, those recruiters will not fare well, if at all, in socialrecruiting as they do not get the engagement part!
For many recruiters dabbling in social it is still as a fish out of water - push and pull [post and search] as opposed to engagement. Those trying hard to understand ‘engagement’ will win into the future as they will be developing their recruiter / employer brands as the leading voices. Equally candidates developing their own brands online will inbound attract the best jobs and recruiters with high signal and those with a means to engage right back e.g. candidates attracting an opportunity without doing a job search at all before they are even looking! Once recruiters are trusted engagers of value, then I think twitter followings will grow too and most will take place in the land of the always on Smartphone and upwardly mobile!
For further proof, a recruiter that has any applicant tracking of any worth in place, then a steady drop in relevant candidate applications from job board/listing sites, even in times when there are more active candidates about, is evidence itself that candidates are shifting to social networks and search technologies as a first port of call for the job hunt. The good news is socialrecruiting conversations in the recruitment citadel are switching slowly from “ nay it won’t work.. ” to “can it work?” and then onto “err.. how can we make it work?” but the audience themselves are driving change. Of sourcing strategies that are getting it, employers are ahead of 3rd party recruiters in many cases - so far.
So for the proof then, socialrecruiting is caught red handed to be right here and now - but as a thief of the very opportunity itself for those ignoring it.
Helping You Hire
As a seasoned Staffing Solutions expert, I can tell you that we readily utilize social media sites for sourcing, and to increase our online presence. We still utilize job boards as well, to make sure we are getting a broad range of candidates, but Social Media is definitely a great additional tool for recruiters. link to staffing-solutions.biz
Gordon Rendall
Hi, what an interesting article! I’m just in the middle of my job search and I’ve discovered many career portals which offer useful information and advertise variety of job postings. One of them is Ivy Exec so I’m wondering if any of you have heard about https://ivyexec.com before and what are your experiences?