No longer just the shiny new object in the toolbox, social media recruiting has become an integral part of sourcing and hiring.
A Jobvite survey out this morning says 89 percent of the respondents to its poll (most of them not Jobvite customers) said they are either already using some form of social media in their recruiting or will in the next year. They are also having success; 64 percent said they’ve actually hired people through a social network.
None of this is surprising to anyone who has followed the development of social media. From their roots as a teenage clubhouse, social media networks today have become so ubiquitous and so much a part of American life that half of all adults use at least one of the sites. Pew Research Center says that last year, 48 percent of those over 35 are on a social network.
Facebook is far and away the most popular network. Pew says 92 percent of everyone using a social network use Facebook. No wonder then that 47 percent of North American companies are spending money to reach Facebook’s 700+ million users via PPC. Thousands, perhaps even tens of thousands of businesses — Facebook doesn’t release the actual number of the so-called Fan Pages — have set up sites.
