How are social networks being used for job hunting and recruiting?
Have you been wondering just how much effort you be putting into finding a job via Twitter, etc? Or how much recruiters rely on the various social networks? Well, wonder no more. Recruiting technology company Bullhorn Reach has just published a survey addressing those very questions. Here are a few relevant findings:
“Since social recruiting has proven to be a rapidly growing category, we expect increased social engagement from recruiters. This report evaluates the current social network activity among recruiters and suggests several interesting insights. First, our findings suggest that recruiters are connected to all three social networks, but are using LinkedIn and Twitter much more than Facebook to recruit talent. While we found that LinkedIn is driving the most views and applications per job posted on the “big three” social networks, our analysis shows that Twitter followers are much more likely to apply for a job than connections on LinkedIn or friends on Facebook. Overall, Twitter and Facebook appear to be highly under-utilized networks for recruiting, but we expect that behavior to change during 2012.”
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“While 21% of recruiters are connected to all three social networks, the data shows that 48% of recruiters are using LinkedIn exclusively and are not leveraging the other two networks for social recruiting. Known as the “professional network,” LinkedIn has over 135 million active members who use the site to search for jobs and manage their professional identities. Not surprisingly, we found that LinkedIn is the most widely used network for social
recruiting, followed by Twitter and then Facebook. Our data reveals that Twitter usage exceeds that of Facebook for social recruiting and that recruiters are rapidly ramping up their use of the network. With more than 100 million active users, Twitter has become the second most adopted network among recruiters with 19% using it in combination with LinkedIn for recruiting. Known as the world’s largest social network, Facebook is the network least connected to by recruiters, with only 10% using it in combination with LinkedIn for recruiting. Our data supports the fact that recruiters are using LinkedIn and Twitter more often than Facebook for social recruiting.”
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“Taking network size into account, Twitter is the most efficient at driving applications. Looking at the relative number of applications per contact, we found that a Twitter follower is almost 3 times more likely to apply than a LinkedIn connection. This may be a result of people re-posting jobs to Twitter more often than to LinkedIn or it could also be the nature of the channel — candidates can search for older job postings on Twitter more so than on LinkedIn or Facebook. This suggests that a recruiter does not need a huge following on Twitter for it to be effective. Therefore, increasing the network size could be a valuable way for recruiters to focus their time spent on social media. The data in this chart is consistent with the fact that Facebook is the least effective channel for sourcing candidates.”
Download the full report here…
As it happens, just last week I was having a discussion with a lawyer friend about how much we both use LinkedIn vs. Facebook, and we both agreed that LinkedIn was getting most of our attention and that of our friends/colleagues, so that bit about Facebook usage growing is I think a bit off, at least relative to LI.
Thoughts?
