CareerXroads recently released their Annual Source Of Hire Report which looked at the different sources used by companies when recruiting new employees.
As I would have expected, the top three sources of hires were:
- Referrals
- Career Sites
- Job Boards
Referrals took first place as the top source of hire with 24.5%, closely followed by careers sites with 23.4%. Job boards were in third place with 18.1%.
Although Social Media only accounted for 2.9% of the total, in my opinion it does play a far bigger role as job seekers do tend to “discover” jobs through sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. However, if job seekers then go on to complete applications through a careers website or a job board then there could be some overlap in terms of how they found the job?
1997 v 2012
If you compare the results to a survey 15 years ago by the Society for Human Resource Management you can see that employee referrals were seen in 1997 as a very important source of hire (the same as they are today).
Are employee referrals a large part of your recruiting strategy? What level of employee referral activity do you have in your company?
View The Report
You can view the full report by visiting the CareerXroads website here.
Feedback
What is your view of the 2012 results? Do they surprise you or are they what you would have expected? Do you feel that Social Media plays a bigger role than the 2.9% suggests? Please feel free to comment below:
Interesting as it is Mike – this is a North American study with only large companies targeted (invited to participate) for the survey. Only 37 companies filled in the survey.
While I am not doubting the integrity of the data collected at all , it is a small section of (even) the US recruitment companies that recruit (even if these 37 have loads of vacancies).