What do Job Seekers Think About Social Recruiting?
By Cheryl Morgan
Recruiting paradigms have shifted in recent years, as companies take advantage of new tools and methods for finding, screening, and hiring talent. Add to this the increasing number of Millennials joining the workforce, and their "digital native" habits, and it is easy to see why social recruiting is becoming a major phenomenon.
?Social recruiting and mobility have revolutionised how job seekers find work.
Social Media London posted some eye-opening statistics on social recruiting as of the end of 2013, including the following:
- 73% of companies surveyed by Staff.com successfully hired people using social media
- 42% of companies said that candidate quality improved as a result
- 20% said it takes less time to hire when social media is used in the hiring process
- In the United States, 14.4 million people have used social media when searching for a job
- 29% of job seekers use social media as their primary tool for job searching
Millennials in particular are drawn to social recruiting. Capterra reported in February that 73% of job seekers ages 18 through 34 found their last job through a social network, and that 30% of all Google searches (around 300 million per month) are related to employment. It's clear that job seekers like social media and believe it to be effective.
What Do Job Seekers Like About Social Recruiting?
One of the main things job seekers like about social recruiting is its natural fit with mobility. Rather than searching on job sites that may or may not be mobile-friendly, job seekers can use social recruiting on their smartphones or tablets. Job seekers also like being able to use social networks to find and evaluate companies they would like to work for. And they're turning to the free tools that social networks offer, such as Graph Search on Facebook, to search for jobs. They can easily find out whether any of their social media friends work at or have worked at certain companies by using tools like Graph Search and plugging in relevant search parameters.
Being able to vet potential employers via social media is important to job seekers.
Where There's Opportunity for Recruiters to Improve in Social Recruiting
Since social recruiting is new, recruiters sometimes make missteps in the process. For example, some recruiters become overly concerned about whether a resume matches work experience listed on a job seeker's LinkedIn or other social profile. This is really only a problem if a job seeker is deliberately lying about their experience, and shouldn't automatically disqualify an otherwise promising candidate.
Another place for improvement in social recruiting tactics is in the social recruiting posts themselves, which are part of a very crowded space where there is significant competition to be noticed. Boring posts can easily become lost in a sea of Tweets, and they're not likely to help employers grow and extend their social networks.
A third important opportunity for improvement for recruiters is in mobility. Job seekers spend more time on mobile devices. If recruiters or employers simply share a social media link to a job posting, and that link doesn't go to a mobile-friendly site, those seeking jobs on social media won't bother waiting for slow loads or pages that must be pinched or zoomed.
Conclusion
Social recruiting is an exciting development for employers, recruiters, consultants, and job seekers, because it unlocks important information that was harder to access before. Job seekers love the convenience, mobility, and access to information about potential employers. But success in social recruiting requires expertise, commitment, and consistency. Thinking of social platforms as free job advertising platforms is short-sighted. Those who use social recruiting - whether from the point of view of a recruiter or a job seeker - have to learn what works and what doesn't, and must be willing to invest time to make it work.
Social-Hire is the leading social media marketing agency focusing on the recruitment and careers sector, and we know social recruiting from the point of view of the recruiter and the job seeker. If you would like to learn more about making social recruiting work, we invite you to attend one of our monthly webinars on the topic of building your recruitment brand on social media.
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