SI Review: July/August 2014

Print

Research Report: The Recruiting Disconnect

By Tyler Womack

At some point in the last five years, you have probably felt pressured to expand your company’s social media presence. You have probably been told that if your company fails to fully utilize social media, it is falling behind, it is back- ward, and might quickly become obsolete. To illustrate the high-pressure rhetoric regarding social media, here are a few recent quotes:

  • “Social media dinosaurs beware: living in the dark ages could cost you dearly.”
  • “Jump into social media today, or fall behind forever.”
  • “Companies that fail to fully leverage social media will fall behind – and become extinct.”

The staffing industry is no stranger to social media and social networking — many companies have been successfully using LinkedIn to recruit candidates for years. However, there is often talk about using platforms like Facebook or Twitter for recruiting. Use of these two plat- forms for recruiting seems to be growing in popularity, but the question remains: does it work?

I, as do some others, remain unconvinced. In a recent survey, we asked temporary workers: “When looking for work, which job boards and social networking sites do you use the most?” Out of the more than 3,000 temporary workers who answered the question, only 2.6 percent mentioned Facebook — less than three out of every 100 people. The results for Twitter were even less encouraging — only 0.5 percent, or approximately one out of every 200 people. As a caveat, I’ll mention that our question was phrased as “which do you use the most,” which might influence the results. Nevertheless, the survey would seem to suggest that very few job seekers are using Twitter or Facebook to a great degree in their job searches.

Staffing agencies aren’t having any luck with recruiting via Facebook either. In a different survey, we asked: “Of the following temporary worker recruiting tactics, which one would you say has the highest bang-to-buck return on spend/ effort?” Out of the 12 listed tactics, recruiting using Facebook ranked dead last — only one company out of nearly 500 reported that recruiting with Facebook was the tactic with the highest return on investment. So, it is very unlikely that many staffing agencies are experiencing a great deal of success with recruiting through Facebook.

Overall, job seekers aren’t heavily using Facebook or Twitter to find jobs, and staffing firms aren’t seeing great returns from recruiting on Facebook. To be fair, perhaps the firms that responded to the survey are not using these social media sites effectively. On the other hand, if you aren’t using Facebook or Twitter for recruiting, that’s perfectly OK. You aren’t acting like a “social media dinosaur” — instead, you are probably making a good business decision.

Tyler Womack is a research assistant at Staffing Industry Analysts. He can be reached at twomack@staffingindustry.com