Making the Case for Facebook Recruiting

By Vinda Rao

As we’ve discussed before, we released our 2013 North American, European, and Australian Staffing and Recruiting Trends Reports last month. We’ve been examining different elements of the North American report in particular to better understand the opportunities and challenges facing staffing professionals this year.

At Bullhorn Reach we’re all about making personal connections between recruiters and candidates and leveraging social media to facilitate effective communication. With that in mind, I wanted to go into detail about some of our social recruiting-centric findings.

98.2% of recruiters we polled used social media for recruiting in 2012. Now let me stop here for a second. You might be thinking, “98 percent? I know ten people in my 100-person agency who don’t use social media so that can’t be right.” Well, it is right, but our respondents are probably more technologically savvy than some of their peers. We administered the survey online, promoted it through email, and offered iPads as raffle prizes. So, chances are, the majority of people who participated have at least some appreciation for technology.

But moving on, of the 1.8 percent of respondents who didn’t take advantage of social recruiting in 2012, 29.2% said it was because they didn’t know how to measure its effectiveness and 25% claimed it was because they didn’t know how to use it – so it’s not a fear of social recruiting not working, it’s simply a lack of education on how to maximize it.

So, breaking it down by network, 97.3% of recruiters used LinkedIn for recruiting in 2012. Newer social networks also gained traction, with 19.1% of staffing professionals using Google Plus and 3.6% using Pinterest. More than half of respondents (51.3%) used Facebook and 48.8% used Twitter, but these percentages are lower than those of 2011, in which 60.2% used Facebook and 51.5% used Twitter. In comparison, more respondents used LinkedIn in 2012 than in 2011.

Interestingly, when recruiters were asked which social networks produced candidates they were actually able to place, 16.7% selected Facebook while only 12.7% selected Twitter. This isn’t a new trend. In 2011, the same percentage (16.7%) successfully placed candidates from Facebook versus 10.1% with Twitter. This is surprising given that a greater percentage of Bullhorn Reach users have connected their Twitter accounts (29%) than their Facebook accounts (24%), believing that Facebook yields less qualified candidates and should be used only for personal matters.

Read the full blog post here at Bullhorn Reach