As the reach of social media is increasing day by day, everyone including recruiters has started to use it for different purposes. Twitter has grown as a platform for companies to reach the right people for hiring purposes.
To get an idea of how companies are using Twitter for recruitment, Software Advice conducted a survey on job seekers regarding their Twitter browsing habits. The recruiting specific Twitter handles of Fortune 500 companies were also looked into for the survey purpose.
Most People Use Twitter For Job Search
A whopping 58 percent of the surveyed job seekers had used Twitter for job search purposes in the last six months while 42% didn’t. A majority of the respondents (76%) looked at the company profiles for job information while 55% followed the companies they were willing to work for.
Upon being asked whether the companies are using Twitter effectively or not, a majority of the survey participants said that the companies are “somewhat” or “extremely ineffective” at marketing themselves as a great place to work. They further added that the companies were even “ineffective” at frequently posting job openings.
How Fortune 500 Companies Use Twitter for Recruiting
The recruiting specific Twitter handles of Fortune 500 companies were mainly used to tweet about job openings. Almost 38% of the total tweets mentioned the new job openings. But the Twitter handles were used for other purposes as well such as to highlight specific employees (19 percent) and to share information about company events (17 percent).
Highlight of the Report:
- Fifty-eight percent of job seekers use Twitter in their job search.
- 76% of total job seekers looked at the company profiles for job information
- 55% of them followed the companies they were willing to work for.
- Majority of the respondents said that the companies are “extremely ineffective” at marketing themselves as a great place to work.
- Almost 38% of the tweets from recruiting specific Twitter handles of Fortune 500 companies were about the job openings.
- 19% of the tweets highlighted specific employees while 17 percent were about company events.
A majority of the tweets (78%) from Fortune 500 companies included hashtags, making them more common than hyperlinks, images, and videos. Hyperlinks were mentioned in 63% of tweets, images in 50% while videos got included in only 4% of tweets.
Creating a recruiting-specific Twitter handle has become a common practice for companies. Out of the 500 surveyed Fortune companies, 174 (35 percent) had an active company-level Twitter account dedicated to recruiting. Talking about the number of tweets per day, 27% of the companies tweeted once every day. 22% preferred to tweet 3 times a day while 12% opted to tweet more than 7 times a day.
Is Twitter the new Job portal?
Given that the reach of social media has increased many folds, companies need to rethink their hiring strategy. The need of the hour is an efficient use of social media to get the best employees on board. Twitter has turned out to be one of the best platforms for companies to interact with job seekers. The number of adults on Twitter has grown by 28 percent from 2013 to 2014, thus the companies are getting more potential job seekers than ever before.
A good number of job seekers is directly visiting the company’s profile nowadays. So, it’s a wise idea to keep the company profile appealing to encourage more job seekers to follow them.
An important question that appears here is whether companies should create a recruitment specific Twitter handle or should they go with official handles. Many industry experts believe it’s not a good idea to create a recruitment specific Twitter handle instead the official one should be used for this purpose also. The followers of the official Twitter handle are the perfect demographic and might be willing to join the company, so why waste such a huge following by creating a recruitment specific handle?
The recruiters are also aware of the power of social media. That’s why 73 percent of employers are thinking of increasing their expenditure on social media recruiting so that they can reach out to more job seekers. However, the companies must make sure that the tweets and messages to their Twitter handle are responded.
In the era of connectivity, it has become very important for both the job seeker and employer to use online platforms effectively to reach the right junction. Neglecting the potential of social media can turn out to be a huge mistake.
Twitter has definitely catched up the race after IPO but 58% is really huge and seeing the trends, linkedIn is always the favorite for jobseekers. So it is difficult to accept and refute twitter taking the claim for Social Media. Even though its contribution is on rise. Good on taste but little hazy on numbers, i beleive.