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By Lisa Jones

I ran a webinar for the lovely folks at Bullhorn Reach recently (thanks Vinda!) – topic: Social Recruiting; Debunking 7 Myths and Misconceptions (watch it here… but not yet, read this first!)

I promised to follow up with some blogs, so here’s the first myth “debunker:”

Everyone is a candidate

So, you’re out at a club. You’ve had a few drinks, you’re feeling sassy! There’s a girl/guy on the dance floor busting some moves. You’re feeling confident…up you stroll and mosey on in. A bit of eye contact and a lot of nerve!

This so equates to the average recruiter activity on LinkedIn. Sassy, confident (overly?) assumptive, winging it?

Now I know that LinkedIn is a recruitment system, but believe it or not that’s (currently) its best kept secret. Most people on it only spend 17 minutes per month on it (how do they cope?). 26% of them are surfing using their mobile (how the hell do they read your oh-so-mega-detailed-“our-client-is”-job-adverts? Yawn!)

Just Because I’m Dancing doesn’t Mean I Want to Dance with You!

What’s so special about you? Your jobs!? Hell no! I don’t care about them. I care about me. It’s REALLY unlikely that I have logged in specifically to see a job. Have you actually looked online recently? The amount of doomy gloomy blogs about talent shortages make me want to go and open a cattery…Passive candidates are the new black! In fact, they have been for a couple of years. Oh my God! What are we going to do? I know lots of recruiters whose strategy is just to shout louder (it works like a treat in a foreign land!)

LinkedIn even published some interesting “not everyone is a candidate” stats:

• 21% are active (stand back – I’m likely to tango with you!)
• 15% are ”tip-toers” (I’m thinking of looking you in the eye, perhaps flicking my hair about a bit and fluttering my lashes)
• 44% explorers (not exploring too literally on the dance floor, but I am likely to dance if you seem like my type and my husband’s not looking!)
• 20% are super passive (I want to dance on my own – back off!)

Moonwalking
So before you dump the LinkedIn / Twitter / Facebook logins in favour of a cattery deed, think about stopping the assumption that everyone’s a candidate and do 2 things:

1. Start actively looking for people who may actually be interested (go to where people want to dance with you!)

Look out for users with the lovely Job Seeker Premium accounts on LinkedIn.

Search for people with “seeking” or “looking” or “searching” in their profiles (see the fab blog about this from the superb @BooleanBlackBelt on this.

Use Bullhorn Reach and its gorgeous Radar feature to spot movers and shakers.

Think about something a little different with jobs – don’t post a job, ask your community for help finding someone… see if that works!

2. Attract the passives

Get on the dance floor, dump the Funky Chicken and Office Robot dance in favour of some carefully selected moves designed to attract (I’ll let you decide how far to take this!)

Optimise your profile to not just bore me to death with your fab recruitment skills and multitude of jobs but to let me know what you know about me (my world, sector, job, contacts etc…)

Demonstrate, don’t irritate! Share content which I like (if you don’t know what this is you’ve been dancing with yourself for too long! Stop talking at me and listen to me).

I think that we all know that not everyone is a candidate – so can we stop acting like they are?

About the Author:

Lisa Jones is a Director at Barclay Jones, a Consultancy working with agency recruiters, corporate recruiters and B2Bs advising them on the most effective use of technology, web and social media to improve their business processes, recruitment and bottom line. Follow Lisa on Twitter, her business Facebook page, read her blog, check out her Pinterest page and connect via LinkedIn.

By Vinda Rao

Today we released the 2013 North American Social Recruiting Activity Report. The findings were quite surprising. Among the highlights:

Early adopters of social recruiting use a wider variety of social media than later adopters. While the percentage of recruiters using Facebook and Twitter has gone down from 2011 to 2012, the percentage of early adopters from 2011 using these networks has gone up.

Recruiters are relying heavily on LinkedIn, because its value is clear. 64% of recruiters used only LinkedIn for social recruiting in 2012, compared to 48% in 2011, and with good reason. Jobs posted on LinkedIn received more views than jobs posted on Twitter and Facebook put together.

Recruiters are under-utilizing Twitter and Facebook. Only 12% of recruiters were connected to all three social networks – LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter – in 2012. Half of North American recruiters using Twitter for recruiting have fewer than 50 followers.

Facebook isn’t a highly-utilized social recruiting tool because it isn’t popular among recruiters – not because it doesn’t work. Facebook is the largest social network on the planet, but only 22% of recruiters used Facebook for recruiting in 2012, versus 27% who used Twitter. However, 16.7% of recruiters successfully used Facebook to place candidates versus just 12.7% with Twitter.

For more information on North American recruiters’ social media activity, download the full report for free: http://sites.bullhorn.com/SocRecReport_2013?utm_source=Blog&utm_medium=Blog+post&utm_campaign=SRA+blog+post

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By Vinda Rao

As we’ve discussed before, we released our 2013 North American, European, and Australian Staffing and Recruiting Trends Reports last month. We’ve been examining different elements of the North American report in particular to better understand the opportunities and challenges facing staffing professionals this year.

At Bullhorn Reach we’re all about making personal connections between recruiters and candidates and leveraging social media to facilitate effective communication. With that in mind, I wanted to go into detail about some of our social recruiting-centric findings.

98.2% of recruiters we polled used social media for recruiting in 2012. Now let me stop here for a second. You might be thinking, “98 percent? I know ten people in my 100-person agency who don’t use social media so that can’t be right.” Well, it is right, but our respondents are probably more technologically savvy than some of their peers. We administered the survey online, promoted it through email, and offered iPads as raffle prizes. So, chances are, the majority of people who participated have at least some appreciation for technology.

But moving on, of the 1.8 percent of respondents who didn’t take advantage of social recruiting in 2012, 29.2% said it was because they didn’t know how to measure its effectiveness and 25% claimed it was because they didn’t know how to use it – so it’s not a fear of social recruiting not working, it’s simply a lack of education on how to maximize it.

So, breaking it down by network, 97.3% of recruiters used LinkedIn for recruiting in 2012. Newer social networks also gained traction, with 19.1% of staffing professionals using Google Plus and 3.6% using Pinterest. More than half of respondents (51.3%) used Facebook and 48.8% used Twitter, but these percentages are lower than those of 2011, in which 60.2% used Facebook and 51.5% used Twitter. In comparison, more respondents used LinkedIn in 2012 than in 2011.

Interestingly, when recruiters were asked which social networks produced candidates they were actually able to place, 16.7% selected Facebook while only 12.7% selected Twitter. This isn’t a new trend. In 2011, the same percentage (16.7%) successfully placed candidates from Facebook versus 10.1% with Twitter. This is surprising given that a greater percentage of Bullhorn Reach users have connected their Twitter accounts (29%) than their Facebook accounts (24%), believing that Facebook yields less qualified candidates and should be used only for personal matters.

In fact, Facebook’s origin as a personal social networking tool has really hindered its perception as a recruiting tool. We often hear from recruiters who are almost angry at the thought that Facebook could be effective for recruiting. “Facebook should only be for personal use,” they say. And our response is, “did you use Facebook for recruiting, and more importantly, HOW did you use it?” They might say something like “we posted a job on our company page.” But who is following your staffing agency’s page? Are you just posting jobs or are you starting and engaging in conversations about your industry that attract passive jobseekers? Are you liking interesting pieces of content that are relevant to the people you’re trying to target? Are you leveraging Facebook’s “friend lists” feature so that your mom doesn’t see your job posts but your colleagues do?

The bottom line is, recruiters’ own experience and results from the past two years indicate that Facebook is a more utilized and more effective social recruiting channel than Twitter. This isn’t to argue that Facebook is most effective, of course. 92.9% of respondents stated that LinkedIn produced candidates they were able to place. But either way, even if Facebook isn’t your preferred vehicle for recruiting, you owe it to yourself to at least try it.

About Vinda Rao:
Vinda Rao is Bullhorn’s marketing manager, where she handles public relations for the company and marketing strategy for Bullhorn Reach. A technology PR pro by trade, Vinda produces research on the intersection between jobseekers and recruiters. She developed and wrote the recent North American, EMEA, and APAC Staffing and Recruiting Trends Reports. She has a bachelor’s degree in English and French from Tufts University. Follow Vinda on Twitter and LinkedIn.