Bullhorn (www.bullhorn.com), which specializes in customer relationship management (CRM) software for the staffing and recruiting industries, has released its annual Social Recruiting Activity Report, based on the real usage data of 260,000 recruiters around the world leveraging the Bullhorn Reach social recruiting product.
While 97% of U.S. recruiters used LinkedIn for social recruiting in 2014, compared to 21% using Twitter and 19% using Facebook, Facebook was the only social network that saw any increase in share. The percentage of U.S. recruiters using Twitter declined rather substantially from 26% in 2013. And 71% of U.S. recruiters chose to use only LinkedIn for sourcing candidates and posting jobs, indicating that those who use the network are more reliant on it than ever before.
Other key findings in the Bullhorn report include:
° Social recruiters in North America are becoming less social: The percentage of “power users” – recruiters who use all three major social networks (LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter) to post jobs and attract candidates – declined in the U.S. (from 12% to 9%) and Canada (from 10% to 7%), but increased in Australia (from 11% to 13%) and China (from 1% to 2%).
° Recruiters may not love Facebook, but candidates do: With the exception of Canada, job views (defined as a candidate clicking on a job post on a social network to learn more) on Facebook increased in every country Bullhorn analyzed between 2013 and 2014.
° Facebook applications per job post are increasing in North America: Although LinkedIn received nearly twice as many applications per job post (defined as when a candidate contacts a recruiter in response to a job post) in the U.S. as Facebook or Twitter in 2014, Facebook was the only network in North America through which job applications increased this year.
° Recruiters for skilled industries are leveraging social networks to find candidates: In the U.S. and Canada, the majority of jobs posted on social networks were for the IT industry, followed by healthcare in the U.S. and staffing/recruiting in Canada. Previous Bullhorn studies have found the primary benefit of social recruiting to be access to passive candidates, so this is no surprise. The top vertical for social recruiting in the United Kingdom was oil and gas, followed by IT.
° Mobile applications through social networks are a major trend: 20% of all social recruiting-generated job applications came through mobile in 2014. Job applications through mobile on Facebook quadrupled between 2013 and 2014, and job applications through mobile on Twitter almost doubled.
° BlackBerry is still in the game: For candidates applying for jobs through social networks on mobile devices, Apple iOS was the most commonly used operating system, representing 50% of mobile applications on LinkedIn and 67% of mobile applications on Facebook. However, for Twitter, 39% of mobile applications came from BlackBerry – which led the pack for that network.