Everything is shifting to social media, and that includes talent recruitment. Just as newspaper classified ads gave way to job boards, people are turning more and more to social media to fill vacancies and find new job opportunities. By crafting an effective social media strategy you can meet your audience where they already spend their time.
How large is the social media audience? LinkedIn has 260 million active users. Twitter has 330 million. Instagram has 800 million. And Facebook has an incredible 2.17 billion active users. That’s a huge pool of potential candidates, many of whom aren’t reachable by more traditional methods.
Social media networking is the fastest growing means of finding, attracting, and recruiting talent. According to Pew Research, 86% of 18 to 29 years olds use at least one form of social media, and that’s the age group which makes up the majority of the job seeking market. Growing at the rate of 10% from 2016 to 2017, social media is now a critical new component of talent acquisition.
Social media recruiting is effective for reaching both active and passive candidates, salaried non-management employees, as well as management candidates. Organizations are finding that using social media as part of their recruiting strategy mix increases the available pool of high quality candidates while ultimately decreasing the time it takes to fill these positions.
Consider this:
- 59% of employees say a company’s social media played a part in their decision to accept a job offer.
- 86% of those in their first 10 years of professional life used social media to look for job opportunities or to research companies they were interested in joining.
- 94% of professional recruiters now use multiple social media sites to find and approach passive candidates.
It’s time to add social media to your recruiting strategy. It’s a sure-fire way to enlarge your reach, globalize your candidate pool, increase your exposure to active and passive candidates, and decrease the time it takes to fill vacancies.
Continue reading in Part 2
