Recruiting the best candidates is critical to any company’s success today and many exciting tools have been created to help them find and source the key talent. But choosing the most suitable tool to meet an organisation’s specific needs can become a tricky job for employers.

There are lots of options to source candidates these days – either through social media, or different job boards, referrals, agencies or with the help of an ATS system – and I will talk about each one of them in a series of blogs.

After attending the Social Media in Recruitment Conference I got very curious about social media recruiting and I decided to do a bit of research.

I asked myself why has social media recruiting become such an important subject in the HR world? Why should companies use it? What are its actual benefits?

What I discovered was that there are more devices connected to the Internet that there are people on Earth, that 40% of people socialize more online than they do face-to-face, 100.000 tweets are sent, 2 million queries are searched on Google and 684.478 pieces of content are shared on Facebook every minute.

Here are some statistics made by Creotivo about the most used social networking channels:

So, social media makes real time engagement possible and allows companies to develop deeper connections with clients in ways that were previously not possible.

Therefore,

• through social media, employers can reach candidates faster and at a lower cost because, as opposed to agencies, job boards or referrals, recruiting with social media is totally free.
• social media tools allow employers to engage with their target audience and easily identify whether the candidates are a good cultural fit for the company or not.
• social media will spread the information about a company making more people aware of its job opportunities and getting employers in front of candidates whom they may never find through traditional hiring methods.
• because there is less spam, employers will get a better and higher response rate when using social networks to communicate with potential candidates.
• social media is great for referrals and they have the highest chances to result in a mutual fit.
• passive candidates can be reached easily as they rarely visit job boards. So social media might be the only way to reach and engage with them.
• with social media platforms like LinkedIn, job seekers can be specifically targeted and chosen from followers, connections or supporters of the brand.

There are obviously some downsides to recruiting via social media and/or job boards but I will talk about them in a future post.

Until then, remember that, all in all, recruitment is all about sourcing the right talent so having more options is better for employers and job seekers as well.