Jobvite 2012 Social Recruiting Survey
As all IT recruiters know, social social media sites like LinkedIn and Twitter are becoming our most valuable source for finding those rare job candidates with on-the-job experience using highly-in-demand tech skills. According to a recent survey by Jobvite, 92% of recruiters are utilizing social recruiting in 2012.
I thought the Jobvite survey was interesting because they polled over 1000 recruiters and HR professionals to learn which social media venues they find most useful and what benefits they are getting, if any.
Here are the results of the Jobvite survey in a nutshell:
Most popular sites for social recruiting
- LinkedIn – 100%
- Facebook – 66%
- Twitter – 54%
- Blog – 21%
- Google+ – 20%
- YouTube – 19%
Top benefits of social recruiting
- Decreased Time to hire: 21%
- Improved Candidate Quality: 43%
- Increased Quantity of Candidates: 50%
- More Employee Referrals: 31%
Networks that produced the most successful hires
- LinkedIn – 89%
- Facebook – 25 %
- Twitter- 15%
My Reaction
LinkedIn is by far our most successful social media venue for recruiting quality IT candidates. We regularly place job candidates that we find via our extensive networks on LinkedIn and through our LinkedIn Company page.
I’m very surprized to see Facebook as the number two source used by 25% of recruiters and HR pros. At Stafflink we do not find Facebook to be a good source for experienced IT talent. It’s not that there is a shortage of great candidates on Facebook. The challenge is that my staff and I tend to see Facebook as a personal site for friends and family. We do not feel comfortable mixing business with our personal lives. That said, we do have a Stafflink Company Page on Facebook. But we have never sourced a job candidate through our Facebook page to date.
With the advanced search feature on Twitter we have successfully found a number of great candidates through Twitter. We regularly Tweet our jobs and blog posts which helps us attract even more candidates.
Find Out How to Use Social Media for Recruiting
If you want to know the “how” part of social recruiting, Stafflink IT recruiter Michelle De Rubeis recently wrote a post with the Top Social Search Engines for IT Recruiting. Michelle also wrote the ebook “Boolean Search Secrets for Becoming a Master IT recruiter” which give you some great tips for mining LinkedIn for job candidates.
Here’s the infographic:
