Most Companies Use Social Media For Recruiting, Says Survey

Recommended by elsterama on July 6, 2010 via ReadWriteWeb

A large majority of companies are moving away from job boards and toward social media as their primary recruiting tool, according to annual survey results released by social recruitment software company Jobvite.

The report, entitled Jobvite Social Recruiting Survey 2010, was based on an online survey taken by 600 participants between May and June.

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Of the respondents who are actively hiring this year, 92% said that they either "currently use or plan to" use social networks for recruiting new employees. Meanwhile, spending on more traditional tools like job boards and third-party recruiters either decreased or stayed constant for a majority of companies.

Not surprisingly, the social networking site most used by companies for recruiting is LinkedIn (78%) , followed by Facebook (55%). The site that saw the most growth was Twitter, which wasn't even a blip on the radar when Jobvite first conducted this survey in 2008, but was used by 45% of respondents this year.

Most hiring firms will review a candidate's social media presence as part of the vetting process, with 38% indicating that they always search for applicants' social networking profiles and 32% doing so only sometimes.

Indicating that the social media's involvement in job recruiting is more than just hype, the survey reported that 58% of companies had successfully hired employees via a social networking site.

The complete results of the survey are available on Jobvite's website (free registration required to download).