What Is Social Recruiting?

If you work in HR, you can’t escape the social recruiting buzz. But what is social recruiting, and why is it important for modern talent acquisition and retention? Most practitioners agree that social recruiting is the process of finding or recruiting job candidates through the use of social platforms. Those platforms could include social marketing tools like Facebook, Twitter and Google+, or career-focused tools with a social component such as Glassdoor. Recruiters at the top of their game understand that social recruiting can fall into two different categories:

1. Internet sourcing. This is the process by which recruiters use social media profiles, blogs and online communities to search for and find information about potential candidates.

1. Employer Branding. This is the process of using social media platforms and networks as a way to distribute information about jobs. This can be done through HR vendors or through crowdsourcing, in which job seekers and other influencers share job openings within their online social networks. 

Employers are extensively using online social networks both to research individual candidates and to broadcast available positions. In fact, the use of social media has become an essential part of most companies' current recruitment strategies. According to Jobvite’s 2013 Social Recruitment Survey, 94 percent of the 1,500 respondents are already using social recruiting and plan to increase their investment in candidate recruitment by 73 percent. Reaching top employees via the social Web is more important than ever; for instance, 55 percent of Millennials now say a prospective employer’s online reputation matters as much as the job it offers, according to a survey by Spherion Staffing. (Forty-seven percent of all workers agree.) As recruiters become more adept at tapping into social recruiting, they are experiencing a number of benefits. Those benefits include:

• Time. Employers who use social recruiting spend 33 percent less time recruiting for each new hire they make, according to the Jobvite survey.
• Quality. Recruiters who use social recruiting report significantly increased candidate quality, of about 43 percent over traditionally recruited candidates.
• Clarity. When screening candidates through various social networks, recruiters can also better assess the candidate quality and make more informed hiring decisions.

With social recruiting, the lines are blurring between marketing and recruiting. Just like marketers, recruiters must leverage all possible channels to find the right candidates for their positions, and they must carefully send the right messages to their target audiences. As social media continues to grow and recruitment continues to become more similar to a marketing exercise, the emphasis on social recruiting is only expected to grow. In fact, Forbes says that 2014 will be the year that the integration of social technologies into recruitment, development and engagement practices will become the status quo. If you want to be on the cutting edge of HR practices, make sure social recruiting is part of your lexicon and your toolbox.