Study: Social recruitment growing rapidly

Social media's role in recruitment is growing quickly to become a staple tool alongside recruitment software for recruitment firms according to a recent study, however there is still room for improvement. 

The seventh annual survey by Jobvite got the opinions of more than 1,800 recruiters and human-resources professionals across a range of sectors, revealing that social media recruiting has become a major focus for many companies with 93 per cent currently using or planning to use social media as part of their recruitment strategy and 73 per cent having already hired someone using it.

Forty-four per cent of recruiters who had begun using social media as a recruiting tool said they had noticed an uptick in both the quality and quantity of candidates they were seeing.

However, the field of social media recruiting is still young, with only 18 per cent of recruiters considering themselves social recruiting experts. A third of companies spent nothing on social recruiting, while 41 per cent spent less than $1,000 a year.

2015 is expected to be a highly competitive year, with 69 per cent of respondents thinking that competition for talent will increase. The main ways of staying competitive identified were increasing social recruiting budgets, and focusing on referrals and mobile recruitment.

Although Facebook has been clawing out a niche for itself, LinkedIn is still the go-to platform for most on the recruitment side of the equation, with 79 per cent of social media hires coming through the website, while 26 per cent happened via Facebook. However, while recruiters prefer LinkedIn, job-seekers seem to prefer Facebook, with 86 per cent of job seekers using the website to search for roles.

Checking job-seekers' social-media presences has also become very-much the norm, with 93 per cent of recruiters checking potential-hires' profiles and 55 per cent saying they had reconsidered candidates after seeing their profiles (with 61 per cent of those reconsiderations being negative).