If any Vistage members are thinking of taking on more employees, then they may be interested in a new piece of research from XpertHR which has found that social networking media is playing a more prominent role in recruitment.
Over the past two years, six employers in ten (59%) have increased the proportion of vacancies that they advertise on social media platforms such as Facebook and LinkedIn.
The findings show that social media is a rapidly increasing feature of many organisations' recruitment strategies. The 2013 survey of digital media recruitment shows that just under half (46%) of employers use social networking platforms when hiring staff, compared to 89.1% who use their own corporate websites and 81.8% who rely on commercial job boards.
Growing trend
The smaller proportion of organisations who incorporate social media platforms into their recruitment strategies reflects the fact that social media is a more recent - but growing - development in the digital landscape.
Candidate attraction
The survey found that employers tend to use social media at the early, candidate attraction stage of recruitment rather than at the subsequent, applications management stage.
The most common way for organisations to use social media is to promote themselves as an employer, either by driving applicants to their own corporate or careers website or by developing the organisation's corporate page on a social media platform.
The three most popular social media channels that employers use to advertise their vacancies are LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.
Despite its relative newness as a candidate attraction tool, only a minority of employers (22%) have experienced problems with using social networking media for recruitment.
Reduce recruitment costs
The use of social media scores highly in increasing the recruiting organisation's reach to a wide range of potential candidates, according to our sample of employers. Respondents are also positive about its effectiveness in reducing recruitment advertising costs and filling vacancies with suitable people, although it is not perceived as reducing the workload of those HR professionals involved in recruitment.
