How effective is it recruiting through social media?
Answers
We tried it with no luck, but another agent we know solely uses LinkedIn to post jobs and says it's 100% effective. We tried it one time and didn't see one applicant. It is also less expensive than traditional job postings. The one we use the most now and hire the most from is Indeed.com.
We use LinkedIn and Facebook to recruit for open positions through our employees. We get about 60% of our hires (of about 100 new hires/year) from employee referrals so, yes, social media/networking does work for recruiting. We utilize Jobvite to manage the application and interview logistic process and you can set it up to auto-post for any jobs, jobs in your department, etc. (for example, all finance-related openings auto post to my LinkedIn status every few days without any action from me and I can turn it off/change settings at any time). We also use job postings; I know we use Indeed.com but I'm sure of the others we use.
If you are talking about from a posted position perspective, the answer seems to be yes. Posting job openings in groups that are specific to level (i.e., CFOs) or industry (i.e, health care) ... attract a better quality candidate because those are the people, for the most part, who are in those specific groups.
Public job board postings, on the other hand, seem to draw resumes from anybody and everybody from the unqualified to the barely qualified to the hopefully very qualified.
I think it has a lot to do with your targeting of candidates. LinkedIn seems to be gaining traction across the generational spectrum. I am not sure other social media options are quite there yet with companies that are not consumer or high tech. Good old fashion networking still seems to be the best option.