Archives for March 2013

Does Social Media Really Only Account For 2.9% Of Hires?

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:

Why Are Recruiters Slow To Adopt Mobile Recruitment?

I spoke a couple of times last week at the Recruitment Agency Expo in London and the subject of my presentation was “Mobile Recruitment – no longer an optional extra”.

In one of the sessions there were 85 recruiters in the room and only 5 of them (just 6%) had a mobile-enabled website.

This was on the same day that comScore announced that out of a total UK mobile audience of 49.5 million, nearly 32 million (64%) have a smartphone and 8 out of 10 new mobile phones purchased today are smartphones.

If you also take into account the following stats from the “What Users Want From Mobile” survey from Google:

•    52% of users are less likely to engage with a company that doesn’t have a mobile presence
•    48% of users felt like the company didn’t care about them
•    36% felt like they had wasted their time

then it really does paint a picture that recruiters are way behind the curve in terms of embracing mobile and are potentially damaging their business at the same time.

With Google stating at our Mobile Recruitment Conference that 1 in 5 of all job searches are now mobile, and some companies seeing 30% of their website traffic now coming from a mobile device, it really does surprise me as to why mobile recruitment isn’t taken more seriously?

What do you think the reasons are for the low adoption rate? Is it simply a lack of knowledge or the fact that they recruiters don’t appreciate the size of the problem and how many potential candidates (and revenue) they are losing? Please leave a comment below.


About The Author

Mike Taylor runs Web Based Recruitment, the Online Recruitment Marketing and Events specialists, with a focus on  Mobile, Video and Social Media. Previous events run by Web Based Recruitment include the Social Media in Recruitment Conference and the Mobile Recruitment Conference.

NEW for 2013... The Mobile Recruitment Workshop on the 12th March 2013, designed to help you understand and implement mobile recruitment into your company.