New Report: IT Most Popular Industry for Social Recruiting
Today Bullhorn released its annual Global Social Recruiting Activity Report, focusing on the actual anonymous usage data of 260,000 recruiters around the world who use Bullhorn Reach. We sought to assess the efficacy of LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter on candidate sourcing and jobseeker behavior, and this year’s findings – like those of years past – did not disappoint.
First and foremost, recruiters have a Facebook problem. They just don’t use it. Of all three major social networks, Facebook was the least utilized by recruiters – only 19.3% leveraged it for posting jobs. This is stupefying given that Facebook has a larger active user base than LinkedIn and Twitter combined. And while Facebook was the only network whose market share amongst recruiters increased from 2013 to 2014, the uptick was slight. Okay, we get it. Facebook is for personal relationships, not professional networking. It’s completely natural for recruiters to feel more comfortable with LinkedIn, which was born as a purely professional network, and Twitter, which is inherently public. But here’s the catch: candidates love Facebook. Job views – defined as when candidates click on job posts to learn more – increased on Facebook in almost every country we analyzed. Therefore, while 80.7% of recruiters are content to ignore Facebook as a sourcing tool, the 19.3% of recruiters who are using it have a captive audience of young professionals to impress.
Another key finding? Social recruiting is incredibly popular with recruiters focused on sourcing candidates for skilled positions such as IT. In the United States and Canada, the majority of jobs posted on social networks were for the IT industry, followed by healthcare in the U.S. and staffing in Canada. The top industry for the United Kingdom was Oil and Gas, followed by IT. This is not surprising to us. We’ve long determined from our recruiter trend surveys that the biggest advantage of social recruiting was attracting and connecting with passive candidates. Given that IT talent is in high demand, the best and brightest are by-and-large taken. While they may not respond to cold calls or e-mails, they’ll read whatever is on their news feed. Bullhorn Reach offers unique features like Engage, which allows recruiters to share interesting news articles with their networks in addition to job posts. Maybe you won’t appeal to that prolific software engineer on the phone, but she might respect your chutzpah if you debate the merits of a piece from her favorite blog.
This year’s report is chock full of interesting statistics from recruiters in the U.S., Canada, the UK, Australia, India, and China. And best of all? It’s free to download and read.
To download the Bullhorn 2014 Global Social Recruiting Activity Report, please visit: http://pages.bullhorn.com/WC_14-09-03_NA_SocialReport.html?LS=Public_Relations&LSD=WC_14-09-03_NA_SocialReport
