Half of employers failing to use social media for recruitment
Despite the social media boom, employers are not actively using social media to recruit and manage job applicants.
A survey showed that only 46% of employers use social media to recruit, and most of them use corporate websites (89%) and job boards (82%) as recruitment tools. Out of this 46%, LinkedIn ranked highest as the most popular platform, with 78% choosing it as their weapon of choice. Other popular platforms include Twitter (48%), Facebook (37%), and YouTube (10%). Moreover, recruitment using social media was mainly self-managed by the employer, with 82% usually managing the process themselves.
Employers viewed social media as a useful tool for increasing the organisation’s reach to a wide range of candidates, with 60% generally agreeing that it was fairly effective. Results also showed that social media was used at the early candidate-attraction stage of recruitment rather than managing applications: 50% used social media platforms to advertise jobs, and only seven percent used social media to screen the suitability of potential recruits on their social networking pages.
The 2013 XpertHR survey on using digital recruitment gathered responses from 138 employers from various industries.
