Social media is the new frontier in job searching and recruiting. According to a survey by CareerBuilder.com, 35 % of US employers use social media to market their company, while others are utilizing it to recruit and research potential staff (21 %), or strengthen their employment brands (13 percent). This survey was conducted with 2,534 U.S. hiring managers and 4,498 U.S. workers. LinkedIn is driving the most job-related traffic (47%) to career sites, followed by Facebook (30%) and Twitter (16%). <——This blog has some interesting usage statistics and trends on peak usage hours and days of social media sites across different demographics, I recommend checking it out if that sort of thing interests you. A lot of the info is based on US research, but still worth looking at.
As a job searcher, mining through thousands of social media postings to find relevant, local opportunities can be a daunting task. However, a tool provided by Google simplifies the process and works well to harness the potential of social media recruiting:
According to their website, “Realtime Search lets you see up-to-the-second social updates, news articles and blog posts about hot topics around the world.”
For example, I performed the search “recruitment Edmonton job.” Any FB status update, Tweet or LinkedIn update (whose privacy settings are such that they are viewable by the public) that contains these words appears. And because it all functions in real time, new posts are added as they happen to the search results. From there it’s a simple task of scanning through the results for jobs that interest you, sending in your resume, acing the interview and capturing your dream job, because it is just that easy!
Maybe not, but at least Google Realtime helps to simplify one stage in the process.
Happy New Year!
Tom Zabel