NEWS
Awareness and corporate policies are hindering social media recruitment success despite growing staff demand
24 Feb 2011

A new global survey of HR professionals published by StepStone Solutions on 23 February 2011 reveals that corporate policies and lack of understanding are stifling recruiters’ use of social media such as Facebook and LinkedIn to acquire new talent, despite the fact that two thirds of employers say they want to hire more people in the coming year.

From the candidates’ perspective, 82 per cent of jobseekers respond positively to contact via social media, making it ideally suited to building talent pools among in-demand staff. The full survey results, the barriers to social media adoption, and ways to overcome them and drive new candidate streams, are discussed in a new White Paper from StepStone Solutions.

According to the report, sixty percent of the employers surveyed already use social media as part of their recruitment strategy and over a quarter of employers yet to explore social media plan to do so in the near future. Yet 28 per cent said that corporate policies restricting access to social networking sites were a problem, and a lack of awareness of social media was cited by 69 per cent of respondents as the greatest barrier to implementation.

StepStone Solutions CEO, Matthew Parker, explains: “Recruiters’ interest in social media is growing – 96% of recruiters said that social media has a role to play in recruitment - because it’s one of best ways to reach out to potential employees worldwide and build new talent pools, especially for high demand skills like mobile application developers or managers with experience in emerging markets. However, many recruiters aren’t opening Twitter accounts or LinkedIn pages in the absence of clear corporate support. Red tape and a lack of understanding may be harming the uptake of social media despite the fact that recruitment tools with built in capabilities are there to support them.”

The White Paper provides the full survey results plus a step-by-step guide to establishing a talent acquisition action plan and outlines tools for measuring social media success.

Source : Stepstone Solutions