CCP Social Media Survey
- 01 Mar, 2012
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- Posted by
Michelle Kilcarr
Michelle Kilcar of CCP recruitment conducted an in-depth analysis of how Social Media is impacting the recruitment landscape in Ireland. The research indicates that Social Media in the recruitment process is still in the early stages of adoption in Ireland. The research highlights that LinkedIn is the top performing social networking site and currently proves most effective in sourcing engineering, IT, financial, HR and science staff. Referrals, employer branding, mobile recruitment and LinkedIn were considered as future trends in talent acquisition.
The recruitment landscape is changing in Ireland and this change is driven by technology. The change itself is how the communication channels have evolved and the way organisations are adopting these into their recruitment practices.
Social Media is not only dominating the personal lives of individuals but now also plays a key role in business. Organisations that adopt Social Media expect to achieve a range of benefits through its use, including employer branding, ability to reach passive candidates, referrals for vacancies, service feedback, cost reduction in advertising and the speed at which information can potentially travel at. Organisations should be aware that Social Media is not a strategy in itself but rather a communication tool that plugs into the business which must be firmly rooted in the business objectives to attain success.
Kilcar outlines some of the key findings from the research carried out in March of 2012. Data is based on responses from 211 professionals in the Human Resources, Recruitment, Business and Communications disciplines in Ireland across a wide range of industries.
- Social Media is still in the very early stages in Ireland. Just fewer than 30% of respondents spend less than 5k on social recruiting but it is encouraging to see 23.6% of respondents have staff dedicated to Social Media. 47% of respondents only started using SM 2 years ago. The smaller companies are not spending over 10k. The larger spend (>10k) is driven by the larger organisations and this situation is mirrored across the staff dedicated to Social Media.
- The primary reason to engage SNS’s is to avail of passive candidates. LinkedIn is the dominant source but Facebook and Twitter are almost on a par in terms of usage. The type of staff sourced is primarily engineering, IT, financial, HR and science respectively. The recruitment agencies are dominating the landscape in terms of success followed by the IT sector.
- Organisations appear to be playing around with advertising as opposed to building online communities or writing blogs. It would be interesting to assess why, i.e. is it due to a lack of resources or skills. The majority of respondents are availing of internal training and taking the approach of teaching themselves by trying to figure it out as they go along.
- Upon further investigation of the 13% of respondents who achieved success in hiring 100+ staff, 87.5% had a strategy for SM. What appears to be evident is that this success was most likely due to development and implementation of strategy, i.e. taking the time to investigate and plan what will work for their organisations.
- Organisations are really availing of the free tools with advertising and appear to be seeking every opportunity to use these. The study revealed that 57% engage SM tools to avail of low cost advertising. Engagement appears to be really low as organisations are still fixed on broadcasting the vacancies as opposed to using content to interact with users of SNS’s. The study revealed that content is primarily driven by vacancies (80%).
- Organisations in Ireland are slow to adopt new functionality, technology or applications on the Social Media platforms. The interface with the SNS’s is still static with very little take up on the games (1.4%) and competitions (7.7%). Only 9.4% of respondents have a mobile app but 2012 may see further up take as 23% have plans to develop a mobile app. It is a concern to see that over 60% would not accept a LinkedIn profile in place of a CV and it would be interesting to establish is this due to a lack of awareness surrounding the facility, their infrastructure lacks the architecture to facilitate or they lack the skills to implement it etc.
- Social Media is a contributor to raising employer branding which is why almost 42% engage Social Media to recruit and almost 60% believed it actually did raise their employer brand awareness on these platforms.
A copy of this research can be downloaded from www.ccprecruit.ie
