With 3.96 billion people worldwide using social media (58.11% of the world’s population aged 13+ years, rising to 82% in North America) recruiting through sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter seems like an obvious place to start.
There are several advantages when using social media to find potential staff. Firstly, it is very cost-effective. Posting a job advert on your company Twitter or Facebook page is completely free of charge.
LinkedIn have various paid solutions – including:
1. LinkedIn Recruiter.
LinkedIn Recruiter’s pricing starts at $8,999 per year. LinkedIn Recruiter is an advanced tool for searching LinkedIn profiles, organizing your findings, and getting in contact with candidates. It offers 150 InMails per user monthly, bulk InMailing, and advanced search options that include access to full profiles of all LinkedIn members.
2. LinkedIn Recruiter Lite.
LinkedIn Recruiter Lite costs $2,399 per year. As the name implies, it is a scaled-down version of Recruiter. Lite offers 1 user and 30 InMails per month. Full profiles can be seen for 3rd-degree connections. It has fewer search parameters available than the full version.
Source: BetterTeam
Secondly, it is much quicker and can reach a larger audience compared to traditional means of recruitment. Content can be shared amongst users, for example, a tweet relating to a new job vacancy from a company page could be re-tweeted by friends and employees of the company and have the potential to reach hundreds more users.
Another huge advantage in using social media to recruit is the fact that recruiters can view the profiles of potential employees, which will give the recruiter more information about the candidate than a traditional 2 or 3 page CV would do.
There are lots of indications that social media works in the recruitment world. Larger companies now have dedicated careers pages on Twitter and Facebook, most company websites now link with their social media profiles and many organisations employ dedicated social media executives to administer their company social networking pages.
20% of companies now say that social media as a recruitment tool is ‘essential’, with a further 60% saying it is ‘fairly important’.
Above source: Agency Central
So, yes, it appears that social media does certainly work and trends suggest that social networking will continue to grow as a recruiting tool. However, it does not mean to say that social recruiting cannot be used alongside more traditional means of recruitment. It should be treated as an enhancement rather than a replacement by recruitment agencies and employers alike.
