Mixed views on social media in interim recruitment

Sourcing new candidates through sites like LinkedIn can lead to significant savings. Job boards could also become less popular as social networks improve job search capabilities. LinkedIn currently has an automatic candidate matching functionality whilst Twitter has a job search feature.

The Royal Bank of Scotland is going to launch a social media hub to aid recruitment and hopes to use this for 30 - 40% of lower-level hiring. Microsoft and the Army already use social media for the majority of their recruitment [90%] and it's estimated that Intel is currently the 6th largest user of social media worldwide.

Of course social networking may well be a good way to source potential candidates but face to face interviews are still going to be necessary.

The Association of Recruitment Consultancies however urges businesses to be cautious. Recruitment agencies use sophisticated methods to assess candidate's suitability which are not available to employers recruiting through social media.

UK businesses on the whole have been slow to leverage the power of social networking with a large number believing that they simply distract employees from their work. And yet 76% do not have a formal social networking policy in place. Of the companies that do have a policy, 60% believe that it helped avoid loss of productivity whilst just 21% claimed it helped with recruitment.

Recruitment specialists, Manpower, recently conducted a survey into the use of social networks and found that 11% of UK businesses believed that they could boost brand awareness whilst a mere 7% used them for assessing candidates.

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