While LinkedIn has long been the favourite social media platform among recruiters for sourcing candidates, it looks as though Twitter is planning to reposition its role in the social media hiring process. Twitter has the lion’s share of job postings with 51% of jobs that are posted on social media going to Twitter. In comparison, only 23% of jobs are posted onto LinkedIn.

The same research, however shows that only 1% of candidates expect to find work through Twitter, a belief that Twitter are doing their best to dispel through their own survey, which finds that 77% of British Twitter users believe that the service could help them to find a job. We can either read from this is that Twitter is a far more effective recruiting tool when it comes to the British market, or that the replies to a survey change depending on what the researchers wants to find!

Ian Morris, a tech writer who has used Twitter to find work, wrote in his article on the Twitter vs. LinkedIn debate that: “When I went from a full-time job, to freelance journalism I put hours into my Linkedin profile, and as far as I can tell, it did very little for me. Perhaps you need to be more pushy, and ask people for work more directly. But I’m British, and that’s not how we do things.”

In February this year, Twitter launched its first UK and Europe job fair which featured big name companies including John Lewis and British Gas doing a careers advice Q&A. The Twitter job fair promoted the #YourJob hashtag, which doesn’t seem to have lost momentum as it is still being used by companies that are advertising vacancies right now.

Is Twitter really making an impact on the job market though? According to Social Meep, only 15% of recruiters have made a successful hire through Twitter, whereas 89% of recruiters have hired through LinkedIn. While there may be more jobs being advertised on Twitter, figures suggest that there’s less conversion.

When it comes to recruitment, Twitter’s hashtags, lists and following capabilities mean it has a more relaxed, friendly - and some might say creative - approach to job searching. However, job seekers say that 47% of companies are “ineffective” at using Twitter to post frequent job openings and 43% aren’t good at communicating with job seekers.

LinkedIn’s more formal approach, on the other hand, still suits some job seekers and recruiters much more. Detailed, CV-style profiles and the trend towards establishing thought leadership on LinkedIn’s Pulse means that candidates with credentials can really show them off and advanced searches allow recruiters to search more efficiently than they ever could on Twitter.

There’s no doubt that Twitter certainly lends itself to a different kind of job searching and recruitment strategy than LinkedIn, but if Twitter is able gain enough traction to overtake LinkedIn as the go-to social media for recruitment then they’re going to have to up their game even more.

About the Author: Ron Stewart has worked in the recruitment industry for 30 years, having owned companies in the IT, construction and medical sectors. He runs the Jobs4Group, and is CEO of Jobs4Medical.