89% Of Businesses Plan On Using Social Networks For Recruiting

Sites include jobvite.com , LinkedIn.com . Published on June 19th, 2012. Written by Anthony West.

Social media sites may be poor in converting users into buyers but the one thing they excel at is helping businesses find employees. This has caught on massively with the rise of LinkedIn and now it seems more and more businesses are using the medium for job recruiting.

A survey conducted by Jobvite, a social recruiting platform and provider, found that about 89% of US businesses plan to make social media a key part of their recruiting strategy in the coming months. This is a slight improvement on the 83% who had expressed an intent back in 2010.

Recruiting success is also up and 64% of the companies surveyed said they had made a successful hire through social media in 2011. This was a jump on the 58% success rate cited in 2010. LinkedIn continues to lead the way and accounted for 73% of social hires in 2011. It was followed in distant second by Facebook which accounted for just 20%. Twitter was third at 7% so you can guess what share any other platform might have had.

Competition of course is a big factor wit social recruiting and poaching is a big problem. Many companies have gone to extremes; even ceasing LinkedIn accounts from employees who leave for the competition.

All in all though, social media is settling down into a bevy of tools for all and sundry. Pretty soon you’ll be able to tap into it for almost anything.