When you look to recruit this year, you’ll almost certainly be looking at social media as one of your methods for getting the word out.
That’s what the latest numbers from Jobvite’s annual social recruiting survey show for 2012. And while more than nine (9) in 10 are using social media for recruiting, 73 percent have made a successful hire using social media.
The survey also asked about what specific networks employers are using as well as attitudes toward candidate behavior on social networks.
Here’s a hint: don’t worry too much about the political and religious posts but do make sure you’ve practiced up on your grammar.
Network importance
Not surprisingly, LinkedIn is the number one social recruiting source (with 93 percent of respondents using it). Of course, the very definition of job posting on LinkedIn’s network might not meet some people’s ideas of what is and isn’t social recruiting.
Facebook continues to grow as a source with two-thirds of those surveyed using it for recruiting purposes (and perhaps more will be if and when the company launches its new jobs section).
Twitter is also growing at a similar pace with over 50 percent using the social network for recruiting.
When it comes to hiring, 89 percent of respondents have hired from LinkedIn, 25 percent through Facebook, and 15 percent through Twitter. That’s a huge disparity in numbers for recruiting versus hiring on Facebook and Twitter. While many seem to be using social networks, the only one they’ve really mastered when it comes to finding future employees is LinkedIn.
Using social recruiting didn’t necessarily improve time to hire. Only 20 percent saw improvements.
Attitudes regarding candidate social media content
While the survey focused heavily on social network metrics, it also examined recruiter attitudes about the types of content they like to see when recruiting for positions.
Garnering the most positive recognition was involvement in professional and non-profit organizations (80 percent and 66 percent respectively).
Some of the more unpopular topics include illegal drug use, sexual content and profanity. All of those received higher than a 60 percent negative rating from recruiters. And while topics revolving around alcohol consumption might be in bad form for 47 percent of respondents, they were even harder on people with poor grammar, with more than half responding negatively.
Political and religious posts were seen as neutral content by most respondents.
Survey background
According to Jobvite, the survey reached 1,000 respondents (with only 13 of the 1,000 respondents being Jobvite customers). The respondents came from mostly U.S. companies with outliers in Canada, the UK, and a few others. Respondents covered a wide swath of industries including agriculture, communication, construction, education, finance, government, healthcare, internet, manufacturing, mining, real estate, retail, services, software/technology, telecommunications and transportation.
This is the fifth year of the annual Jobvite survey. In last year’s survey, 89 percent of companies surveyed planned on using social media to recruit while 64 percent had hired via social networks.
You can get a free copy here.