Social Recruiting in Australia and New Zealand. What do Recruiters really think about it?


Posted By: Thomas Shaw, 8:00am Friday 30 April 2010

The latest RCSA Quarterly Business Manager Survey for 1st Qtr, 2010 has been released. It's no surprise that mainstream job boards still lead the advertising medium recruiters use to source candidates. The trend indicates recruiters are decreasing the use of networking events, niche job boards and refer-a-friend incentives (see image below).

This was the first report produced by the RCSA asking recruiters specific questions about their use of social media sites and tools in the recruitment process. The use of social media by Recruiters in Australia and New Zealand is very low and I'm not that suprised by the results of the survey.

Nearly two thirds believe that social media extends the reach of more traditional sourcing techniques and 58% believe it is cheaper. Nearly half think it allows access to a specialised candidate base while only a third believe it gains a broader candidate base. Most believe it doesn’t help filtering unsuitable candidates, improving candidate quality. They also consider it to be less reliable.




Nearly half use it as part of their marketing strategy or in an ad-hoc way while just over a quarter are not pursing social media as part of their marketing strategy.




Nearly a quarter have social media security protocols and policies with 16% having internal blogs that can’t be reached by the public. Few have return on investment and impact matrixes. 14% have Twitter accounts. Research by ProShortlist found that



Nearly half use social media for candidate sourcing, 28% for employer branding and engaging with their communities and education and information gathering. 20% use it for client sourcing while 11% use it for reference checking.




Where social media is used for reference checking, only 7% of the full sample use business sites and 4% social media such as Facebook.




Again, I make no apology that the RCSA survey has failed to correctly identify sourcing channels recruiters use to source candidates. Social Networking sites should be grouped together. What ever happened to Resume Databases? Newspapers? Print Media? Surely these are more important (and used) channels than Second Life.