Are you having any success using Social Media for recruitment?

[Maisy Heyward]

Hi Buzzers,

We're about to recruit for a middle management position and I was wondering if anyone has had any success using Social Media for such positions?

To be honest, although I'm an occasional user of things like Facebook and Twitter I have no idea how I could effectively use these apps to recruit people.

Is anyone will to share their experiences?

[Qld IR Consultant]

LinkedIn would be far more useful. Twitter is good to keep up a professional profile, and facebook is purely for keeping in touch with family and friends. I certainly don't put any merit in it for business use.

[Cottoneyes]

Facebook is really only going to be an extension of getting referals from your current employees, if your employees are on facebook and are happy to be following their employer.

Current scenario is you tell the employee there are x jobs open at the moment and if they know a friend or relative who is in that line of work and looking to move, they refer them.

Social media trend is you list on the company facebook page you are looking for x type of person to fill a vacant role. The employee likes or shares it and so all of their friends see that your company has the vacancy. The benefit is that your vacancy will be seen by all 100+ friends at once, not just the ones your current employee will see in the next fortnight, or possibly think about.

I have a relative who worked in recruitment for a predominantly .com type IT company who did some successful recruitment via facebook, however for more traditional type of organisations the impact of it would be limited.

If your company is like some companies and bans facebook, twitter and the like at work, it's going to be less likely to be successful. You really need your employees and possibly other business connections to be following your companies facebook page or twitter feed for it to work

[Cottoneyes]

I'll also add, if you are going to be serious about it, might be worth looking at including any referal bonus you currently pay to staff to include any referals that come from their 'liking' of facebook posts or retweeting of twitter and whatever it is called on Google+ and Linked In.

[Maisy Heyward]

Thanks for the responses.

I asked the question because I have seen a few HR specific media articles proclaiming that social media is transforming recruitment and replacing traditional recruitment methods, but I couldn't figure out how that could be happening!

[careercargo]

Great question - how do you use social media to get a job.
Someone mentioned Linkedin how does this work? You search via job title and see if you like the profile? Personally I'd like to see some real stats on the reality of social media - like I got a job via Linkedin by doing this... I heard someone state the forum and blogs get people jobs. This seems like a lot of work to maintain for what can be done in a more traditional way - is the 100 hours spend updating and chatting and blogging better spent in other ways? Something to ponder, and I'd like to hear from others.
Dave.