In a newly competitive environment for attracting top talent, HR departments and recruiters need to go through many online and offline channels to find viable candidates. Over the past few years, employers have found that a social media recruiting strategy is not just a “nice to have” but a need to have. Today, job seekers are looking for positions via websites such as Monster.com and CareerBuilder.com as well as placing their resumes and profiles on social media sites such as LinkedIn in hopes of being able to get noticed by top employers.
Likewise, job seekers are not just looking at job postings that appear on social media and job sites – but also perusing the Twitter, Facebook and websites of the companies that interest them. A recent survey from Jobvite found that a business which has a dynamic social media profile has a better chance of recruiting top candidates.
Jobvite also reported that NOT being having a social media presence can be very detrimental to finding the right employees. In fact, the research iterated that 94% of HR professionals are using social media such as LinkedIn and Facebook to find viable employees. In addition, the report discovered that there is considerable ROI for companies that look for candidates online as “…60% of recruiters estimating the value of their social media hires as greater than $20,000 per year, and 20% estimating the value as greater than $90,000 per year.”
The report also noted that most recruiters using social media found that it “…improved both the quantity and quality of candidates.” This may be due to the fact that social media allows recruiters to get to know candidates better. “With 9 out of 10 surveyed companies using social media in their recruiting strategy, candidates and companies are now in direct communication, all the time,” reports the Jobvite survey.
This social media interaction allows recruiters to gauge the personality, interests and accomplishments of job seekers.
Over the past decade as social media sites have become a common method of contact in both the personal and professional realm, social networks and corporate career sites have significantly risen in importance for recruiters. Here are some of the key finding from the Jobvite research:
- 73% of recruiters will increase their investment in social networks in 2013
- 43% of employees from referrals and company career pages stay longer than 3 years, while only 14% of job board hires stay longer than three years
- 65% of recruiters surveyed use Facebook and 47% of recruiters use Twitter to post about company culture – Facebook and Twitter are the main channels that recruiters use to showcase employer brand
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