While social media use as a means to collect and hire top talent remains hot and trendy in the recruitment world, job boards still top the list as the best place to find candidates.
Talent generation services firm Talent Technology Corp. found that 63 percent of professional recruiters use social recruiting as a sourcing tool, but just 12.5 percent of candidates come by way of the technology, according to a recent “State of Recruiting 2012” report released Jan. 25.
Job boards remain the top source used by recruiters to find candidates, with 17 percent of candidates coming from the sourcing method, respondents reported. Employee referral, 15.8 percent; corporate websites, 13.8 percent; and internal applicants, 12.5 percent, round out the most effective methods to find candidates, the survey said.
Despite being tagged as a dying method to source candidates, job boards still play a vital role in today’s recruitment landscape, said Gerry Crispin, principal and co-founder of CareerXroads, a corporate staffing research consultancy, in Talent Management’s January “Insight” profile. The method is useful both for the recruiter and the job seeker.
“Job boards help identify the leads,” Crispin said in the interview. “If I quickly search the job boards, I can find the companies that are now hiring. Now I can go to the social media to find people inside the company that can be my employee referral.”
He continued, “We’re seeing a channel — a convergence of many different tools all being used by job seekers who are savvy to find their way in.”
Crispin said a combination of all sources — job boards, employee referral, social media — will best enable recruiters to find talent they are seeking.
The Talent Technology Corp. report also found that, on average, it takes recruiters 45 days to fill a position, that they spend about 15 hours per week sourcing for candidates and about 4.5 minutes, on average, to read a resume.
Additionally, the C-level proved to be the most difficult type of position for recruiters to fill, while executive level, mid-level managers and “skilled positions” were also difficult, the survey said. “Admin positions” was listed as the easiest category for recruiters to fill.
Among the social networking sites most used in recruitment, LinkedIn topped the list, with 40.1 percent of survey respondents reporting they use the tool. Facebook, 30.1 percent; Twitter, 13 percent; and Google+, 7.6 percent, were also among the social media services recruiters said they use.
Nearly 6 percent of the survey’s respondents said they don’t use social networking websites to recruit candidates.
Talent Technology Corp., a Vancouver, B.C.-based talent generation firm, sources more than 80 million applicants through its systems for its clients each year, according to a press release announcing the results of the survey, which polled more than 1,100 recruitment professionals in the fall.
A webinar, which will highlight the results of the survey, is set for Feb. 7.
