- How often have you come across people sharing job requirement posts on your Facebook timeline?
- Do you recall a time when you have forwarded job vacancy posts to your Whatsapp groups?
Welcome to the world of social recruiting! Yes, employers are increasingly using social media platforms such as Linked In, Facebook, Whatsapp, Twitter and Google Plus to source and connect with potential candidates.
According to reports,
- 94% of the recruiters plan to use social media for recruiting.
- Employers who use social media for hiring found 49% improvement in the quality of the candidates.
Global Scenario
Linked In is being used to search for candidates, contact them and keep tabs on potential candidates, Facebook and Twitter is used for showcase employer brand, generate employee referrals, post job offers, vet candidates pre and post-interview.
Per reports, 73% of the recruiters plan to increase their investment in social recruiting. 56% of employers use LinkedIn Pages, 37% use LinkedIn Groups, 32% use Twitter feeds and 24% use Facebook Pages to engage the potential candidates. Recruiters use social media platforms to review the candidate profiles, professional experience, mutual connections, specialized skills, length of professional tenure and sample works.
Parallelly, 30% of job seekers use LinkedIn Pages and 24% check out employer reviews on sites such as Glassdoor, Payscale, Vault, and Great Rated!
Indian Scenario is not as rosy as Global One!
- How easy it is for recruiters to hire candidates using social media platforms?
- Can social media hiring help hire the best talent?
- What are the best suited tools in Indian Context?
- How good is candidate experience so far?
Not just these questions but there are many to answer in Indian Context, Social media is yet to be used to its fullest potential in Indian context. Surprisingly social media sourcing contributes less than 5% of overall Source Mix for most of the companies in India.
Reasons for poor shows are:
These platforms can help recruiters to reach out to a broad spectrum of candidates but does not really help in finding top quality candidates.
Potential candidates may not share the requisites qualifications on social media platforms despite possessing them. In the process, recruiters could overlooking such candidates.
Keeping tab on potential candidates across various platforms could be a humongous task.
Below are the Traditional Sourcing Strategies that are yielding results and cannot be ignored for all possible reasons;
While numbers may show the growing trend in social recruiting, employers and job seekers across various industries still prefer the traditional methods like Agencies, newspaper advertisements, radio ads, online ads through job portals, traditional job portals, referrals, internal transfers, campus, finishing schools/Training Institutes and direct sources as they do not want to miss out on qualified candidates who are not active on the social media.
Social media could be used as a parallel channel for recruitment and is unlikely to replace the traditional channels for next few years unless companies drive adoption, set source mix targets and have specialized teams to hire through social media platforms.
Some of the Tech solutions that are available in Indian Market for posting and monitoring profiles include:
- Belong.co
- Hire Rabbit
- Talent Bin
- Bull Horn
- Job Vite
- Talent Recruit
- Talent Now
- Zoho Recruit
My Final Two Cents!
Employers and recruiters cannot ignore the fact that social media hiring is here to stay. They must not only be well versed with the social media tools to stay ahead of the competition but must also formulate their own strategies to reach out to and hire the right candidates.