Chris Thompson, MBA, is a social recruiting strategist.
A 2012 study released by Bullhorn, Inc, revealed that LinkedIn is the preferred social network for recruiters sourcing candidates. The study looked at social media activity on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Bullhorn pulled data from its network of over 35,000 recruiters.
The study concluded that 48% of recruiters are using LinkedIn exclusively, and only 21% of recruiters use all three social networks. After reviewing the study, I believe there are three reasons why recruiters are not using Facebook and Twitter as a true social recruiting channel.
1. It is Easy to Push Jobs through Social Media Channels. Companies like Bullhorn make it easy to post jobs through their social medial channels to active candidates. A social network is a group of people with a common interest and developing a social network takes time. As recruiters, we need to fill open positions immediately, not a year from now. Most recruiters use social media as another site to post jobs and not to maintain relationships as most do on Facebook.
2. Most LinkedIn Members Do Not Realize Their Profiles are Visible to Recruiters with a LinkedIn "Recruiter Account." A LinkedIn recruiter account is the holy grail of passive candidates. LinkedIn offers access to all 120 million members through a corporate recruiter account. Both recruiters and hiring managers can develop their own network of passive and active candidates and communicate future and current vacancies through LinkedIn's inmail program. With the account a recruiter can conduct searches and actually build a company organizational chart with candidate contact information.
3. The Recruiting Community Has Not Embraced the Concept of Inbound Marketing. According to Lou Adler (2011), 64% of any candidate population should be classified as passive job seekers. Since passive candidates are not looking for new opportunities, traditional outbound marketing activities are ineffective for almost two-thirds of the potential candidate pool. An effective social recruiting plan uses inbound marketing tools like SEO blogs to reach active passive candidates. Blogging takes time and is not an activity that most recruiters want to undertake.
Facebook and Twitter represent a tremendous recruiting opportunity for organizations that are open to reallocate some of their outbound marketing budget to inbound marketing. Inbound marketing is less costly than outbound marketing and builds a loyal following of potential employees with industry experience. The issue, is time, which will be discussed in an upcoming post!