The Job Hunt Gets Social

More companies mining LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter for 'social recruiting' effort

August 14, 2011|By Gus G. Sentementes,
The Baltimore Sun

Gary Bacon spotted a Web designer job posting online several months ago and shot an email to a recruiter at Medifast Inc. But that was just the beginning.
Bacon connected with a recruiter, Caitlin Goldstein, and the conversation moved to Twitter. They tweeted back and forth, and Goldstein got to know Bacon, found links to examples of his work — and eventually felt confident enough to invite him to Medifast's Owings Mills headquarters for an interview.

Welcome to the brave new world of recruiting, which has expanded into social media. Just a few years ago, much of the action took place on online job boards, but now social networking sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter have supercharged the experience for recruiters and job-seekers alike.
"Everyone is using LinkedIn, and if you aren't, it's probably a little bit of a concern," said Jessica Lee, vice president of talent acquisition at the Washington communications firm APCO Worldwide and editor of Fistful of Talent, a popular blog about recruiting.

LinkedIn's many online networking tools have struck a chord — and opened a source of revenue — for the company in the recruiting industry. The company, valued at more than $8 billion after going public this year, derives much of its income from job ads and tools it sells to companies and recruiters looking for talent.
While job boards still fill a major need, such sites tend to attract mostly active job-seekers. Recruiters, always on the prowl for top talent to poach, are using social networks to better identify top professionals in their fields, connect with them through "word-of-mouth" approaches and lure them away with job offers.
Nowadays, a typical executive might have a resume posted on LinkedIn, a Facebook and Twitter account, a blog or their own website — and recruiters are busily mining those sites, Google and more for the right candidates.

Recruiters often are directed to find "passive" candidates — working professionals who are employed and who might not have considered changing jobs until they were made the right offer.
"LinkedIn is a gold mine for passive candidates," said Jay Feeley, practice leader and account executive at MRI GlobalSearch inTimonium.

Read More @ The Baltimore Sun

New Survey Finds That 89% Are Using Social Media in Recruiting

by John Zappe on Jul 12, 201
No longer just the shiny new object in the toolbox, social media recruiting has become an integral part of hiring.

A new Jobvite survey, titled Social Recruiting Survey 2011, found that 89 percent of the respondents to its poll (most of them not Jobvite customers) said they are either already using some form of social media in their recruiting or will in the next year. They are also having success; 64 percent said they’ve actually hired people through a social network.

None of this is surprising to anyone who has followed the development of social media. From their roots as a teenage clubhouse, social media networks today have become so ubiquitous and so much a part of American life that half of all adults use at least one of the sites. The Pew Research Center says that last year, 48 percent of those over 35 are on a social network.

 

LinkedIn’s older, educated demographic

Facebook is far and away the most popular network. Pew says 92 percent of everyone using a social network use..[read full report]

Global Social Media Statistics.. Comparing Major Job Boards vs Networks

May 10, 2011 at 8:23PM | Harpaul Sambhi 

Many individuals have requested the insight both Careerify and comScore gathered when writing Social HR. Today, I will share some of the data to you.

The common misperception about social media websites is that only people under age 25 use them. In February 2010, 1.2 billion people used the Internet at least once, according to data from market research company comScore from our book Social HR. Usage statistics show Facebook is most popular among Internet users aged 15 to 24, with about 42 per cent of this age group accessing the [read full article]

5 Social Media Recruiting Tools for Small Business

May 23, 2011 by Donna Wells
Back in the day, I ran big organizations with fat budgets and spent a lot of money on recruiters — sometimes with good results. Now, in my fifth startup, I want and have to do recruiting personally. 

Since time is the only resource more scarce than dollars, I’m always on the hunt for slick new tools and apps that can address the labor-intensive process of finding and hiring great people. With the advent of social media and cloud apps, there are some great new solutions out there. From automated applicant responses to upgraded versions of old recruitment standbys, there’s a new guard of socially focused recruiting tools designed for your every hiring need. Here are a five to take note of.

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1. The Resumator

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What it is: Applicant tracker, social recruiter, email replacer
How it works: This tool helps hiring managers keep real-time tabs on where their job listings are posted and who’s looking at them. Upload a job description to the site and it automatically posts it to Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. After that, The Resumator tracks candidate resumes, and applies its own algorithm to rank applicants on a five-star scale. Better yet, it takes care of a part of the hiring process that often gets shortchanged — sending automated email replies when resumes are received and when a candidate must be declined. It also has a Twitter-like “What Makes You Unique” feature, where applicants describe what sets them apart in 150 characters or less. It’s a great way to quickly get a sense of the candidate’s personality.
Cost: $49 to $399 per month, based on volume

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2. Jobvite

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What it is: End-to-end social web recruiting and tracking tool
How it works: Jobvite is an SaaS platform that delivers a seamless and social recruiting process before, during and after the interview. It leverages the very best source for great hires — your own employees — by allowing them to see your company’s open jobs and send targeted invitations to their friends on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Once their friends or contacts get into the pipeline, the referring employee can track the interview process. The tool also matches..[read more]

How to use social media as a recruiting tool

LYNN GREINE
Published Monday, Jun. 06, 2011 9:44AM EDT

Recruiting quality staff is no longer a matter of placing an ad in the newspaper and then wading through a mountain of (horror of horrors) paper resumés. Today’s tech-savvy candidates expect to find jobs the same way they do much of their...[read full article]