Social Sourcing: How Do the Big Guys Stack Up?

“Social” may have been the biggest buzzword among recruiters in 2012, and for good reason: 73 percent of companies made successful hires via social media channels during the last year, and job seekers’ use of social media is also on the rise. According to a 2012 Jobvite survey:

  • 52% of job seekers used Facebook to help find work (up from 48% in 2011)
  • 38% used LinkedIn (30% in 2011)
  • 34% used Twitter (26% in 2011)

While many top companies have what we consider to be the top tools for social-media sourcing in place already – job sharing apps on postings and a career-specific presence on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook are the essentials –surprisingly few of them are actually using these tools effectively to engage with top candidates.

In today’s highly-competitive recruitment environment, effective candidate engagement is the key to building your employment brand, and to keeping candidates interested during what is often a lengthy hiring process.

Below, we’ve compiled top findings from our new 2013 Fortune 100 Talent Acquisition Report, released today, to show where leading companies are missing opportunities to engage candidates via social media. Maybe our findings will help your company avoid making the same mistakes in 2013.

  • Fortune 100 companies have yet to leverage mobile technology in talent acquisition. Nearly three quarters (70 percent) of these companies do not have mobile-optimized career pages.
  • Fortune 100 companies are socially-selective in their sourcing strategies.While nearly all (91 percent) of these companies have a dedicated LinkedIn careers tab, less than half (44 percent) have a corresponding careers page on Facebook. Only about half (52 percent) of the Fortune 100 have a career-specific Twitter handle.
  • Fortune 100 companies are not using job sharing applications to their full potential. While 85 percent allow candidates to share job opportunities via email, only about half (51 percent) offered the option to share jobs via social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
  • Fortune 100 companies have yet to engage their talent communities. Less than half (37 percent) offer job applicants the opportunity to “opt-in” to their talent communities. Of those companies, only 13 percent allow candidates to opt-in with just an email address, while 24 percent require candidates to create a profile in order to receive regular company news and employment opportunities.
  • The majority of the Fortune 100 companies’ websites now cater to job candidates. Nearly all (94 percent) had a job search function on their career pages and a majority (64 percent) also had function-specific careers pages.

Click here to download a copy of Seven Step’s 2013 Fortune 100 Talent Acquisition Report.

To tweet this report, simply click here.

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