Social Recruiting

Recruiting through the use of social recruiting platforms has widened the employability quotient of job-seekers and has been widely embraced by graduating students and employers as a rewarding job searching medium.

Sources within the Human Resources departments of companies are of the opinion that recruiting through the social media has already made its mark but is now poised to attain newer heights making it an indispensable and obligatory component of recruitment strategies implemented by recruiters and HR departments.

However, social recruiting has also ventured into newer avenues, that may not have the same reach and potential as the big three, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, but nevertheless resourceful enough to provide recruitment functionality to the respective stakeholders. 

Recruiters have taken social recruiting beyond the big three of social media: Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter and have now found that relatively much smaller outlets like Quora, Dribble, Github, Foursquare, and Instagram are as effective and valuable sources of social recruitment. Sites like these cannot match the reach of their more illustrious seniors but their constricted ambit is what makes them all the more exciting and a source of sourcing talent that is precise and specific. 

The emergence of social media sites that offer specific information has made it possible for both the employer and the job seekers and concentrate on their precise needs and has forced conventional job portals to provide value-added services and other information to face the competition for such new sourcing models.

Many mergers and acquisitions have taken place, Instagram with Facebook, Slidshare and LinkedIn and Tweetdeck and Tweeter immediately come to mind. There have been others as well and it seems that the trend of acquiring social media recruiting technologies by the bigger players is likely to continue. 

During a survey, recruiters when asked which social networks they planned on using this year and beyond, an overwhelming 82.6 percent said LinkedIn, Twitter ranked second with 38.3 percent of the votes whilst Facebook managed 37.4 percent. Apart from these recruiters also said that it was  highly likely that they would also be using Pinterest, You Tube, Google+, WordPress, Tumblr and also blogs to match opportunity with talent. 

The mobile is proving to be a strong social recruiting tool, with mobile users being counted in billions. Given that more than half of Facebook users log on with their mobiles and this number is likely to keep on increasing, the significance of Facebook ads that directly target mobile users is simply huge. 

There is little doubt that companies will rely more and more on social recruiting for their acquisition of talent making it the most strategic and transformational method of recruiting the right workforce. No longer can it be disparaged or be dismissed as a passing fad. It is obvious that social media in recruiting is effective, that it works, and that it is speedier and easy on the recruiting budgets.