Social Media Recruitment - Survey Results

2019-02-14

When building the recruitment system Element, we try to stay close to what our ATS users actually need. In January 2019, we ran a survey asking recruiters how they use social media for hiring. The results were telling.

We asked about how often recruiters use different platforms, which ones they think will grow in the coming years, and how they screen candidates when the talent pool varies in size. Some questions were straightforward. Others touched on things that sit uncomfortably between personal privacy and business practice.

Several dozen recruiters took part, most of them working at recruitment agencies (56.41%) or in-house HR departments (23.08%).

Online recruitment on social media - LinkedIn takes the lead

No surprise here: LinkedIn dominates. Goldenline still gets some use, and Facebook is showing up more often, but LinkedIn is the only platform recruiters open every day.

Recruiters also expect LinkedIn to stay on top going forward. They do think Facebook will overtake Goldenline as a recruitment channel, though.

Most social media users would find it awkward to get a connection request from a total stranger. Recruiters? They don’t think twice about it.

What does initial candidate screening look like?

Our survey, run alongside the development of the recruitment system Element, turned up some honest truths about how recruiters behave during initial screening:

When there are plenty of candidates, recruiters toss out anything that isn’t a strong match. As the pool gets smaller, they get more forgiving.
With fewer candidates available, recruiters are also willing to overlook a recent job change, even if it happened less than 3 months ago.
Here’s the uncomfortable one: when options dry up, some recruiters admit to approaching candidates who work at their business partners’ companies. That’s ethically murky, and it’s probably why a number of respondents skipped this question entirely.
If there are lots of candidates to choose from, recruiters won’t chase someone who didn’t reply or said no. But when pickings are slim, persistence goes up.
Experience matters most. Education, certifications, and profile photos carry less weight.
A typical profile review takes somewhere between ten and thirty seconds, rarely more. (I wrote more about this in my article 3 Seconds Is All It Takes to Reject a Candidate Profile. Biometric Research Results. It covers biometric research on how recruiters actually scan profiles.)
Most recruiters try to give feedback, even when it’s bad news.
Once a candidate is booked for a meeting, that’s already a win. Nobody wants to lose them at that stage.

Can Facebook be used to source candidates with no prior relationship to the recruiter?

Some of these findings confirm what we already assumed. Others raise real questions. If recruiters are reaching out to people employed by their own business partners, is that a sign of genuine labor shortages, or just recruiters chasing their targets? When experience outweighs everything else in screening, does that mean four years on the job counts for more than four years at university? And with Facebook sitting on the largest pool of potential candidates in the world, how long before recruiters start using it for direct sourcing?