Now Hiring

By Kathryn Will

A company has a great job opening: competitive pay, room for growth, and a progressive and flexible office culture. But it only gets a handful of applicants, few of whom stand out as the clear choice.

The problem? Not embracing social media as an essential recruiting tool.

Today, at least 76 percent of adults online and 65 percent of all adults use at least one social networking site, according to the Pew Research Center, which is up from 7 percent of all adults and 10 percent of online adults in 2005. A globalwebindex.net poll of 170,000 Internet users found that the average user logs 1.72 hours per day on social platforms, accounting for 28 percent of all online activity. High social media use equates to positions filling faster at a lower recruitment cost.

BENEFITS OF SOCIAL RECRUITING

Posting jobs and soliciting candidates on social media helps to ensure reaching a wider audience than traditional forms of recruiting, such as posting the job to the company’s website or publishing the job in a print publication. And the wider audience reached includes passive candidates who are not actively seeking out a job. Recruiting via social media also may lead to finding better-qualified candidates. Pew found 76 percent of those with a college degree or graduate degree are using social media, and the same study found social media use declines with education level.

According to www.glassdoor.com, a job-search website featuring job postings and employee reviews of salaries, benefits, and other company information, social recruiting allows companies to vet potential hires and to build and solidify their own brand as a great company to work for. For example, GE posts across its social media platforms employee profiles and stories of what it’s like to work for the company, drawing thousands of readers to its Careers Blog, according to “A Guide to Social Recruiting,” by Glassdoor.

A poll of job-seekers and recruiters by www.jobvite.com, a web-based recruiting platform, found that 59 percent of hiring professionals rank social networks as the best source for “highest quality” candidates, second only to referrals, which was ranked as the top choice by 64 percent of polled recruiters.

Such benefits point to a high ROI—in dollars and human capital—by adopting a social recruiting strategy.