Employee referrals not coming from where you think

No doubt about it, social networking is the hot new medium for finding employees. 

A June survey of 800 HR and recruiting professionals by Burlingame, Calif.-based recruiting vendor Jobvite found that nearly 90 percent of U.S. companies plan to recruit through social media this year, up from 83 percent last year. Nearly two-thirds (64 percent) use two or more social networks. 

But of the three major social networks -- Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter -- which one generates the most employee referrals who were actually hired by companies? Surprisingly enough, it's Facebook, not the more career-focused LinkedIn. 

That's according to an aggregation of social-recruiting data from Jobvite's 500 corporate clients, which include Starbucks, Whole Foods and Zappos.com. 

LinkedIn did generate the lion's share of total new hires found via social networking, accounting for 73 percent of such hires within the last six months, according to Jobvite's data. Just 20 percent came from Facebook and 7 percent from Twitter. 

However, Facebook accounted for 43 percent of new hires generated from employee referrals, compared to 41 percent for LinkedIn and 16 percent for Twitter. 

"I was surprised that Facebook is generating as many referral hires as it is," says Dan Finnigan, founder and CEO of Jobvite, which builds tools to help companies recruit via social networking. And yet, it makes sense, he adds.
"Peoples' connections on LinkedIn tend to be with people whom they may never have personally met," he says. "But their Facebook connections tend to be people they actually do.. [read full article]