2011 - The year of social recruitment

Posted in Latest News on 7 Feb 2011

The title of this post may be a little misleading. We're not suggesting social recruiting (referring to social media used in recruitment) has not existed pre-2011. However insofar as it being a mainstream, widely practiced activity across the industry it would be fair to say it hasn't.

In theory, social media and recruitment are perfect matches. Two distinct markets (recruiter to client from a B2B context and recruiter to jobseeker in the B2C context), a service that at its core is about developing long term business relationships, and the requirement of different groups to communicate across multiple platforms - social media would seem perfect for it. But the industry has suffered from a slower than could be expected adoption rate. Early adopters have carved out a niche, but without widespread uptake results have been somewhat limited.

There is evidence however that this is about to change.
This week (Feb 7-11 2011) is designated Social Media Week in some of the world's major cities. It is a week long series of seminars, events, workshops and activities based around discussing social media, its application and its use in industry and commerce. What is interesting is the number of recruitment related events that are scheduled. Even for those who cannot attend, following the events through LinkedIn, twitter and live broadcasts shows signs that social media is starting to become accepted into mainstream recruitment.

The growth of professional platforms such as LinkedIn also points towards the growth of social recruiting. Organisations are starting to develop an audience on various relevant platforms, and are starting to discover that the audience that they find cannot be ignored.

Sector specific communities are also starting to form in smaller groups, reminiscent of the way in which online job sites started to form basic, interest specific communities before exploding into the mass market. Within the legal sector, communities such as Roll On Friday, Defero Law and similar show that social is starting to spread within legal and for ourselves as legal recruiters it is a no brainer to be involved in both industries.

Connect with us on LinkedIn and twitter (@DouglasScottLtd) as we all start to reap the benefits of social media in our sector.

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