CWS 3.0: January 25, 2012

Print

Recruiting: Is Your Supplier Social?

Last week, I wrote about how important it should be to users of contingent labor that their staffing suppliers use hi-tech methods to recruit. One such method is social recruiting, and it matters if your supplier is using it or not. Here’s why.

Seventy-seven percent of respondents from 187 companies with 1,000 or more employees polled in our 2011 Buyer Survey told us that the quality of the temporary worker was a top priority, far and away more important than speed or price. And if you want superior applicants, then your staffing suppliers can’t afford to ignore the social networks where an increasing number of potential candidates are hanging out. And it’s not just Generation X that uses Twitter and Facebook. These networks give you access to rapidly growing part of the workforce, as adoption of social networking spreads across all demographics.

Jobvite, a young, innovative “recruiting platform for the social web,” publishes an annual Social Recruiting Survey. The most recent survey, from 2011, reported some significant developments:

  • 64 percent of survey respondents have hired through social networks in 2011, up from 58 percent in 2010.
  • 55 percent will increase their budgets for social recruiting and 30 percent for referrals, while only 16 percent will spend more on job boards.
  • Survey respondents continue to rank referrals as the most highly rated source for candidate quality.
  • Jobvite Index data confirms this quality assessment: 1 in 10 referral candidates are hired compared to 1 in 100 general applicants.

When quality matters, referrals are the favored way to assure candidate quality. With social media being a growing tool for candidates to interact with their peers, social recruiting becomes an approach that “supercharges” the traditional candidate referral process and supports the recruitment of high quality talent (call it “referrals on steroids”).

So monitor your suppliers to make sure they are using this essential new approach. Or ask your MSP to track how up-to-date your vendors are when it comes to engaging in social recruiting methods. You don’t want to be losing out on high-quality candidates by using suppliers that have not adopted “performance enhancing approaches.”