Is Social Recruiting a Primary Recruitment Method for You?

I have been completing some research recently into recruiting via Social Networking sites and I reached the conclusion that for most organisations, Social Networking mediums are definitely a secondary recruitment method…

So what do I mean by secondary recruitment method?

Why is there such media attention on these new recruitment methods?

Why are organisations not able to utilise the full potential of many of these networks now?

And can I go back to how I have recruited for the last 10 years and ignore these new mediums?

These are all questions that have been actively debated in our office. I am going to try and answer the first two questions in this article and cover the next two in a few days time.

So what do I mean by secondary recruitment method?

Primary internet recruitment methods would currently include, job boards, corporate careers sites and online CV databases. These are primary methods because they are responsible for most of the hires that come from the organisation’s internet recruitment program. In my experience, and from a straw poll of about 40 people I have spoken with so far, social recruiting is not yet making a significant impact. Only two organisations (both niche software companies) suggested they were recruiting extensively via headhunting on Linkedin.

Why is there such media attention on these new recruitment methods?

Well firstly, there is massive potential. Facebook has 250m users globally. Linkedin has over 40m users. Most Recruiters primary problem of “sourcing the talent” would be solved if it was easy to filter through this information and locate relevant people. As I will cover in my second post though, your ability to recruit just via these two mediums can vary greatly.

Secondly, the media love something new, they jump on wacky stories about the internet such as this one or about how people have lost a job via Facebook. They will bang on about the latest survey that shows X % of people will look to use their social network when looking for a job. This can work, and I’m not disputing the potential of your network to help you find your next position, but this has been happening for centuries. Social networks just make the process easier. It is an evolution not a revolution in recruitment terms.

I am a fan of social networks, particularly Linkedin (which I recruit via extensively) and I believe the revolution might be coming. It just isn’t here yet. On my next post I will answer the remaining two questions:

Why are organisations not able to utilise the full potential of many of these networks now?

And

Can I go back to how I have recruited for the last 10 years and ignore these new mediums?

Why Linkedin should do more for Active Jobseekers

Ok, first things first. I must confess, I’m a big fan of Linkedin. It allows my colleagues and I to search a network of over 2.2m UK profiles, which we do on a daily basis, and inevitably turns up a top class candidate or three.

Much has been written on other blogs about how users can use Linkedin to promote themselves. The membership is largely made up of skilled professionals and executives, many of whom have found themselves out of a job and with the phone not ringing for the first time in their lives. They’ve read and applied all the online advice to enhance their profile and expand their network, so why are they are not being approached by recruiters?

Like many other recruiters I want to be able to identify these individuals. They have similar skills to their peers, but they are likely to be far more receptive to my approach. Don’t get me wrong! This is not LazyWebRecruitment, and we are willing to do the work needed to headhunt truly passive candidates, I just think Linkedin could make a simple update to ensure recruiters don’t miss out on searching this active jobseeker network.

Hire Me!

Now I’m open to suggestions as to how best to achieve this? I quite like the idea of adding a flag on their profile page, after the individual’s name, saying “Hire Me”. Then let all recruiters have the option to search for these active job seekers.

Now some of you might say you can already tick a box on your profile saying you are “open” to job offers. This is not the same and the numbers support it. Of the 2.2m profiles I can see in the UK, almost 1m is “open” to career opportunities. This is basically the proportion of people who are willing to consider other jobs.













In the US, Monster has setup a tour to “keep America working”. How have linkedin changed their site to help their members looking for a job?

I attended the Onrec Conference in June and asked Kevin Eyres the European MD of Linkedin this very question. His answer, was that you can search the active job seekers and that they have done a recent update in the past two weeks to add this enhancement. Well, I’m not sure if he was referring to the US site and if this feature is now live (if anyone knows please update me), but it is definitely not here in the UK site.

So with so much talent going to waste, surely linkedin will jump in and help, they don’t have to go to the trouble that Monster has, I recognise that they are not a recruitment service, but they stand in a unique position. So come on Kevin where is this update?

Which is the best day of the week to post an advert on a Job Board?

Our busy part of the week tends to be a Friday afternoon. I suspect Friday morning is a good time for many of our clients to do weekly meetings and decisions get made on new vacancies that they need to recruit for. By the afternoon, we are normally in full swing turning their job descriptions into optimised advert copy for the job boards we use.

Our clients may be keen to get these adverts live by the weekend, but we’ll tend to advise against posting vacancies on a Friday. Customers can always disregard this advice, but there is a logic behind it.

When posting a vacancy on a job board there are two primary methods by which a candidate can discover it, both methods are less effective if you post on a Friday, and here’s why…

Job Search

Many job boards will display the more recent adverts at the top of the search results. Now I am generalising here, some job boards treat adverts equally regardless of when they were posted, and just try to deliver the most relevant advert to the top of the list based on the search term, but the majority will have some bias towards newer postings.

This means if we post your advert on Friday, your advert will perform best when searched for on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. These are the 3 days of the week when people are least likely to think about job hunting, and this is backed up by the audience figures to all the major job boards on these days. Also, did I mention that Friday is typically the busiest day for posting jobs? So post on Friday and you will have the most competition, competing for the smallest audience.

Jobseekers and Email Alerts

The second method is when a job seeker discovers your vacancy by setting up a job alert with the job board. Normally, after a jobseeker runs a search, the job board will offer them the chance to have the results of this job search emailed to them every day, saving them having to remember to return and run this search daily. If we post our advert for your vacancy on a Friday, then the jobseeker would normally get an email from the job board on Saturday morning.

I check my emails 24/7, it’s like a nervous twitch, whenever I stand in a queue or have to wait for something I have to check my email on my iphone. But will your potential new employee have the time to check their email on Saturday? Even if they do are they really going to have time to apply for your position?


Why we do like Mondays

So what is the best day of the week to post a role? Ideally you want to be posting your jobs the day before job board traffic hits its peak. According to all the job boards I have spoken to over several years, it’s Monday. This is backed up by most UK job board traffic peaking on a Tuesday. I have also previously heard from Jobsite that their traffic peaks at around 11am on this day.


Our Stats for June

We managed 98 vacancies in June, generating 24,059 applications, a whopping 245.5 applicants per role for us to screen out all the irrelevant candidates from.

Our friends at Idibu (our job board posting partner) were good enough to send us the figures on when these applications were made. The graph below shows applications dropping off severely over the weekend and peaking on Tuesday, backing up the Monday posting argument. The second chart shows the peak hours of the day for applications.