Social recruiting (using social media in recruitment for the initiated) continues to gather momentum. Facebook this week announced their new (social) Graph Search, which looks like a real step forward for using Facebook for effective recruitment searching. But what about the people that matter for recruiters - the candidates. What are they thinking about all of this?
Well according to a recent survey from Adzuna (Q4 2012), half of UK jobseekers are now using social networks as part of the job hunting process. [Just to add some recruitment context, I would guess that less than half the recruitment companies in the UK are actually using social media to attract them!]
This survey did pop-up some interesting results as you will see below:
- The average British adult is connected to 300 relevant, open job vacancies through their first and second degree connections on social networks.
- Over 90% of large UK employers are now using social media to find staff. Big companies such as Google, Amazon & eBay have been leveraging social media to find staff for some time now, but the last 12 months has seen an explosion in the number of “non-tech” companies using social media to find staff.
- While Linkedin is generally seen as "the" place to go for professional networking, job seekers in the UK would rather leverage their Facebook (43%) than Linkedin (22%) networks to find their dream job. << This I find strange, but I guess it depends on the sectors and their what these 'dream jobs' actually are.
- Men and women are equally likely to leverage their professional and personal social networks to start a new career, with 55% of women turning to Facebook and 58% of men preferring to use LinkedIn.
- 32% of Southerners favour Linkedin for job advice and help, whereas Northerners using social networks tend to start their job search on Facebook. 58% of active social job seekers in Scotland use Facebook as their first port of call in the job hunting process compared to only 34% of Londoners.<< REALLY? I think this must be one of those survey anomalies. Would be interesting to prove/disprove though!
- Retail, Design & IT professionals top the charts for the most social jobseekers. 33% of people surveyed in these industries claimed to have used social networks to land their dream job. Domestic, Maintenance and Legal job sectors are the least social jobseekers with less than 5% of people working in these industries choosing to use sites like Facebook or Linkedin to find work. << No surprise here, although the one sector that is changing fast is the legal sector - contrary what you might think, some big firms are trying to be social in their approach!
- Surprisingly, when it comes to concerns about privacy during job search, only 1 in 8 of those surveyed registered any worry at all. << You use social now and you 'accept' some social privacy compromise - you have to nowadays!
Now just to add some further debate to the north/south social debate here is the breakdown of people using social networks for job seeking across the country:
[Sample size of the survey by Adzuna was 1000 adults]
Make of this what you will, but it would be great to also map the recruitment agencies that do/don't use social media to recruit against this and see if there is some correlation. And before you ask, no I am not doing that!!
So what do you think? Is this a fair representation of how you see job seekers responding to social media in the UK?
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