What is Social Recruitment - and how can it benefit your business?

You’d be forgiven for thinking that there’s a new type of recruiting happening out there.  A quick look at recruiting conference agendas, HR blogs, magazines or journals and you’ll more than likely turn up at least one or two articles on how social recruiting is the next big thing.

So, what is social recruiting?  And, is it, in fact, the new and improved way to recruit?

Firstly, there’s nothing new about social recruiting.  It’s been happening for years.  What is new, however, is that we’re now starting to see how we can facilitate and encourage it using technology platforms that are becoming commonplace in all of the aspects of our lives.

In the past we used the newly-coined “social recruiting” by simply letting our employees know that we were looking for new staff - or even asking them if they knew anyone who might be interested.  Employees referred friends to jobs and, as recruiters, we knew that good employees often have good friends and so they were worth a chat with.

With a lot of social communication being moved to online forums, we now have an online platform to do exactly the same thing.

Social platforms provide a perfect opportunity for us to engage with our employees in the hunt for new staff and, because of the viral nature of them, also provide a way to effectively broadcast our hunt for good people.

Thus, we have the “birth” of social recruiting - an online hunt for good offline people.

Social recruiting is not just a way of finding the best skill-experienced talent but it’s also the best way to find cultural fits – and there’s also significant bottom line benefits of using social networks to recruit.

Recruiters surveyed recently in the US report that they can reduce the time to hire by over 30% and increase of the quality of candidates by nearly 50% by using social recruiting.  They also reported an increase in the quantity of candidates by 43% as well as an increase of 32% in employee referrals by creating a social environment for their employees to help them find staff.

And in a direct win on the bottom line, 60% estimate that recruiting through social networks save at least $20K a year while 20% say it’s upwards of $100K a year.

In the white collar, professional workforce, LinkedIn leads the charge in terms of social platforms. By all reports, LinkedIn now accounts for over 50% of the current recruitment market in this space and 96% of recruiters used LinkedIn as a candidate searching and vetting tool as well as to keep tabs on desirable candidates.  But, is that really social recruiting?

LinkedIn provides a platform for recruiters to seek out the professionals they’re looking for as well as providing a “job board” of sorts for those looking but whether or not people are truly referring people to jobs on LinkedIn - and in what quantity - remains debatable.

To actively provide a platform for good people to help their employers find others like them has been missing from the market and it’s one of the reasons why we built such a platform into Workible.

With the cost of recruiting people still one of the highest costs for most employers, especially those in highly-transient industries like hospitality and retail, having a business and employment focused social platform with the main aim of finding great people via their networks is, in our eyes, something that every employer can benefit from.

So what is the answer?  Well, it’s not Facebook - that’s for sure.  Facebook is a personal platform and not the place where job referrals happen.  For white collar, professional workers, at the moment LinkedIn is the place to be.  For everyone else, (at the risk of a shameless self-promotion) it’s Workible.  Workible’s employer social platform allows you to not only harness the power of online social recruitment, but also encourage it amongst both employees and brand fans of your business which significantly drives down recruitment costs.

Whatever platform best services your needs, social recruiting is a hot trend in Employment Services because it works.

If you’ve had a foray into using social in your recruitment strategies — good, bad or otherwise — please share!