Social recruiting (using social media in recruitment for the initiated) continues to gather momentum. Facebook this week announced their new (social) Graph Search, which looks like a real step forward for using Facebook for effective recruitment searching. But what about the people that matter for recruiters - the candidates. What are they thinking about all of this?

Well according to a recent survey from Adzuna (Q4 2012), half of UK jobseekers are now using social networks as part of the job hunting process. [Just to add some recruitment context, I would guess that less than half the recruitment companies in the UK are actually using social media to attract them!]

This survey did pop-up some interesting results as you will see below:

• The average British adult is connected to 300 relevant, open job vacancies through their first and second degree connections on social networks. 
• Over 90% of large UK employers are now using social media to find staff. Big companies such as Google, Amazon & eBay have been leveraging social media to find staff for some time now, but the last 12 months has seen an explosion in the number of “non-tech” companies using social media to find staff. 
• While Linkedin is generally seen as "the" place to go for professional networking, job seekers in the UK would rather leverage their Facebook (43%) than Linkedin (22%) networks to find their dream job. << This I find strange, but I guess it depends on the sectors and their what these 'dream jobs' actually are.
• Men and women are equally likely to leverage their professional and personal social networks to start a new career, with 55% of women turning to Facebook and 58% of men preferring to use LinkedIn.
• 32% of Southerners favour Linkedin for job advice and help, whereas Northerners using social networks tend to start their job search on Facebook. 58% of active social job seekers in Scotland use Facebook as their first port of call in the job hunting process compared to only 34% of Londoners.<< REALLY? I think this must be one of those survey anomalies. Would be interesting to prove/disprove though!
• Retail, Design & IT professionals top the charts for the most social jobseekers. 33% of people surveyed in these industries claimed to have used social networks to land their dream job. Domestic, Maintenance and Legal job sectors are the least social jobseekers with less than 5% of people working in these industries choosing to use sites like Facebook or Linkedin to find work. << No surprise here, although the one sector that is changing fast is the legal sector - contrary what you might think, some big firms are trying to be social in their approach! 
• Surprisingly, when it comes to concerns about privacy during job search, only 1 in 8 of those surveyed registered any worry at all. << You use social now and you 'accept' some social privacy compromise - you have to nowadays!

Now just to add some further debate to the north/south social debate here is the breakdown of people using social networks for job seeking across the country:

[Sample size of the survey by Adzuna was 1000 adults]

Make of this what you will, but it would be great to also map the recruitment agencies that do/don't use social media to recruit against this and see if there is some correlation. And before you ask, no I am not doing that!!

So what do you think? Is this a fair representation of how you see job seekers responding to social media in the UK?

We work with recruitment agencies and corporates to help them integrate social media into their existing recruitment strategy and recruitment processes. If you require guidance, advice or social recruiting training, get in touch today.

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