The Truth About Social Recruiting Headlines
The myriad of headlines in the talent acquisition and space are misleading and, at times, spellbinding. With the social sharing features on many web sites, the headlines go viral and become truth (for many).
That was one of the topics at the webinar last week “recruiting secrets overheard in a dark alley”, in addition to not believing everything you see online. The slides to the webinar are below, and we’re working on including the recording which will be added soon.
Here is an example used which included 4 recent headlines (none of which are true in my book) and I’m sure could somehow be justified or validated depending on how the data is sliced. They all completely contradict each other.
- Facebook is the #1 recruiting source, accounting for 78% of hires
- Employee referrals are the #1 recruiting source, accounting for nearly ½ of all hires
- Job boards are not dead, they are alive and well – accounting for nearly 40% of all hires
- Nearly 2/3 of hires found their job through “internal sources”
And as I stated during the call, even though Bush had some issues pronouncing the word nuclear, he could have figured this out..
As far as the webinar, we included a list of questions as part of the registration which included hundreds of recruiters from 20 countries and 49 states. We also asked a couple of questions (via polling) during the webinar, which are listed below but are not included in the slides.
Here are 5 examples of the responses from attendees, the practitioners:
- 71% of recruiters have not hired 1 person via twitter
- 64% of recruiters have not hired 1 person via Facebook
- 82% of recruiters HAVE hired from LinkedIn, and
- A vast majority would refer fewer than 10 people they know to a job (re-defining referrals)
- 50% do not have a personal or company twitter account which primary use is for recruiting
So what’s the #1 recruiting source? LinkedIn was the #1 most effective recruiting source selected.
I’m not saying social recruiting doesn’t work, or that it doesn’t make sense. What I am saying is the headlines floating around are at times, laughable. That, and we still see time after time anti-social recruiting attempts at social recruiting.
Enjoy the show..
Data sources include: CLC Recruiting, International Association of Employment Websites, Applied HRM Research, Workforce, Branchout, LinkedIn, Monster.com, CareerBuilder, The Sourcing Institue, Journal of Applied Business Research, Google, Foursquare, Google+, Slideshare, YouTube, Forbes, ERE, TechCrunch, Mashable, iCIMS, SilkRoad, jobs2web, JobVite, Workforce.com, Corporate Executive Board, Webinar Participant Polling – Recruiting Secrets, Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, SlideShare, TechCrunch, YouTube, Mashable, Pinterest, Comscore, Xavier.edu, International Personnel Management Association.
The Latest Social Media Stats For 2012
Yesterday I faciliated a webinar called recruiting secrets overheard in a dark alley (slides and recording to be published here soon). One of the areas we focused on was the continued glamour of social recruiting given all of the “talk” from experts, analysts and vendors the past few years.
The irony is that very few organizations are having real, sustainable successes as a result. When surveyed, a majority of the registrants and attendees (representing 20 countries & 49 states) have yet to make consistent hires as a result of sites like Facebook and twitter, yet when polled, 82% have made hires from the recruiting giant LinkedIn. More about this topic later.
As part of the set up, we researched a majority of the popular social media sites and online channels to provide a list of the most recent stats we could find. Think mobile isn’t growing? There are more iPhones sold in a day than there are babies born! Most of these stats were collected over the past 2-3 weeks so should be recent.. Enjoy!
Twitter Stats
- 500 Million accounts
- 40+ Billion tweets
- 175 Million tweets a day
- 70% of companies ignore complaints on twitter
- 909 employees
- 11 new accounts created every second, over 1 million new per day.
Facebook Stats
- 850+ million members
- 31% check in once a day
- Avg of 20 min per day
- 2.7 billion likes per day
- 100 billion connections
- 20 million apps installed daily
- 250 million photos daily
- 425 million access via mobile
Pinterest Stats
- 10.4 Million users, faster growth than any site – ever.
- Retaining and engaging 3x better than twitter “was”
- 80% of users are women, 60% have attended college, 50% have kids
- Demographics:
- 18-24 years (17%)
- 25-34 years (30%)
- 35-44 years (25%)
Google+ Stats
- 90+ million users
- g+ button is served 5 billion times a day
- g+ users:
- 44% of users are single
- 29% female / 71% male
- 20% are students
- Avg of 6 minutes on site
YouTube Stats:
- 4 billion videos viewed, every day, 1 trillion is 2011
- 24 hours of video uploaded, every 24 seconds
- 2.9 billion hours a month on the site, 326,294 years
- 800 million users per month
- Auto speech recognition tech translates video and captions into 43 languages
- 3+ billion searches daily
- 124 languages
- 20% of searches are local
SlideShare Stats:
- Largest social “content” network
- 60 million visits a month
- 400,000 new presentations uploaded per month
- Top 200 web sites
- 110,000 “recruiting” documents
- LinkedIn acquired SlideShare last week
LinkedIn Stats:
- 161 million members
- 2 million company pages
- 4.2 billion searches in 2011
- 22% of traffic from mobile (last week of March)
- More than 1 million groups
- 35% of students search for jobs on LI, 700% increase since 2010
Mobile Stats:
- 5.9 Billion subscribers
- 8 Trillion SMS messages sent in 2011
- 11+ Billion apps downloaded, 1 in 4 never used again
- The number of mobile searches quadrupled in the last year
- 8.49% of global web site hits come from mobile
Foursquare Stats
- 23 million users
- 2 billion check-ins
- Users and check-ins have doubled in 6 months
Sources: Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Foursquare, SlideShare, TechCrunch, YouTube, Mashable, Pinterest, Google+, and Google.
The Latest Social Media Stats For 2012
Yesterday I faciliated a webinar called recruiting secrets overheard in a dark alley, and discussed some of the truths about social recruiting headlines. One of the areas I focused on was the continued glamour of social recruiting given all of the “talk” from experts, analysts and vendors the past few years.
The irony is that very few organizations are having real, sustainable successes as a result. When surveyed, a majority of the registrants and attendees (representing 20 countries & 49 states) have yet to make consistent hires as a result of sites like Facebook and twitter, yet when polled, 82% have made hires from the recruiting giant LinkedIn. More about this topic later.
As part of the set up, we researched a majority of the popular social media sites and online channels to provide a list of the most recent stats we could find. Think mobile isn’t growing? There are more iPhones sold in a day than there are babies born! Most of these stats were collected over the past 2-3 weeks so should be recent.. Enjoy!
Twitter Stats
- 500 Million accounts
- 40+ Billion tweets
- 175 Million tweets a day
- 70% of companies ignore complaints on twitter
- 909 employees
- 11 new accounts created every second, over 1 million new per day.
Facebook Stats
- 850+ million members
- 31% check in once a day
- Avg of 20 min per day
- 2.7 billion likes per day
- 100 billion connections
- 20 million apps installed daily
- 250 million photos daily
- 425 million access via mobile
Pinterest Stats
- 10.4 Million users, faster growth than any site – ever.
- Retaining and engaging 3x better than twitter “was”
- 80% of users are women, 60% have attended college, 50% have kids
- Demographics:
- 18-24 years (17%)
- 25-34 years (30%)
- 35-44 years (25%)
Google+ Stats
- 90+ million users
- g+ button is served 5 billion times a day
- g+ users:
- 44% of users are single
- 29% female / 71% male
- 20% are students
- Avg of 6 minutes on site
YouTube Stats:
- 4 billion videos viewed, every day, 1 trillion is 2011
- 24 hours of video uploaded, every 24 seconds
- 2.9 billion hours a month on the site, 326,294 years
- 800 million users per month
- Auto speech recognition tech translates video and captions into 43 languages
- 3+ billion searches daily
- 124 languages
- 20% of searches are local
SlideShare Stats:
- Largest social “content” network
- 60 million visits a month
- 400,000 new presentations uploaded per month
- Top 200 web sites
- 110,000 “recruiting” documents
- LinkedIn acquired SlideShare last week
LinkedIn Stats:
- 161 million members
- 2 million company pages
- 4.2 billion searches in 2011
- 22% of traffic from mobile (last week of March)
- More than 1 million groups
- 35% of students search for jobs on LI, 700% increase since 2010
Mobile Stats:
- 5.9 Billion subscribers
- 8 Trillion SMS messages sent in 2011
- 11+ Billion apps downloaded, 1 in 4 never used again
- The number of mobile searches quadrupled in the last year
- 8.49% of global web site hits come from mobile
Foursquare Stats
- 23 million users
- 2 billion check-ins
- Users and check-ins have doubled in 6 months
Sources: Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Foursquare, SlideShare, TechCrunch, YouTube, Mashable, Pinterest, Google+, and Google.
4 Great Tools for Recruiting & Sales
There is no shortage of technology or tools for recruiters or sales professionals, but factoring in engaging with candidates and leads is the key to success in closing deals and generating referrals.
The knowledge you have at your fingertips within seconds matters, and that is the case with these 4 tools for recruiting and sales professionals. Each one of them is about connecting and engaging with your networks (or leads).
The best part, they are all free.
- The first tool is hachi. This is an incredible site that merges your social graphs and connections from all of your networks. And, in the case of multiple paths, it can compute the smartest path to get there via something called the “Path Score.” Hachi looks at factors like similar company, school and common friends. Example: Path from John via Facebook, who knows Susan via Facebook, who knows Charlie via Twitter.
- The second is a great app from Sales Loft which I mentioned a few weeks ago – you can find at JobChangeAlerts.com. With the free service you log in w/ your LinkedIn credentials and it sends you a daily email digest every morning of job changes and transitions, promotions, and birthdays from people in your network. It’s a great tool for engaging and connecting with your network.
- Yes, people still use business cards! Cardmunch, another LinkedIn acquisition, is a powerful app run by humans – not computers. With the app you can take a picture of any business card. Every business card you submit is transcribed, edited and reviewed by multiple workers to guarantee accuracy. They even crop the company logos from business cards. Cardmunch also features 1-Tap LinkedIn Invites, full text search, syncing contacts into address books, and an easy “sharing” feature.
- Last but not least is the email contextual contact plugin (another LinkedIn acquisition) called Rapportive. This social CRM tool will show you everything you need to know about your email senders including who they are, any of their social profiles connected to their email address, whether or not you are connected to them, their latest activity, their location, and the ability to take notes or quickly view previous messages from them.
Great tools like these never replace the art, skill, or competence of great recruiters or sales professionals – but they are an asset for engagement and efficiency. Know of other free tools you’d recommend? Share any in the comments section.
The Top 50 Companies for Diversity
13 years ago, DiversityInc created the “Top 50″ companies in Diversity globally. This years results are out, and the Top 50 are listed below.
It all started back in 2001, when companies were starting to see business value in diversity as a strategic priority.
The companies participating in the survey and assessment from DiversityInc are rated in four areas, including:
- CEO Commitment
- Human Capital
- Corporate and Organizational Communications
- Supplier Diversity
Only 2 new companies made the list compared to last year, and one was a first-time participant. 20 companies moved up on the list, and 24 moved down.
Congratulations to the PricewaterhouseCoopers for the top spot, and each of the Top Companies in Diversity for 2012, from DiversityInc:
- PricewaterhouseCoopers
- Sodexo
- Kaiser Permanente
- AT&T
- Procter & Gamble
- Ernst & Young
- Kraft Foods
- Deloitte
- Prudential Financial
- Colgate-Palmolive
- Johnson & Johnson
- Accenture
- Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corporation
- American Express
- MasterCard Worldwide
- Merck & Co.
- IBM
- Cummins
- Health Care Service Corporation
- Abbott
- Marriott International
- KPMG
- CSX
- Aetna
- Cox Communications
- Dell
- Automatic Data Processing
- General Mills
- Eli Lilly and Company
- Target
- Bank of America
- Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide
- Wells Fargo
- WellPoint
- JCPenney
- Booz Allen Hamilton
- Allstate Insurance Company
- Medtronic
- Verizon Communications
- Time Warner
- Toyota Motor North America
- Northrop Grumman
- Rockwell Collins
- Monsanto
- Chrysler Group
- The Coca-Cola Company
- Capital One
- Lockheed Martin
- Kellogg Company
- MetLife
You can check out more specific information on each company on DiversityInc, or check out the Top 50 from previous years.
Are All Heads of Human Resources and HR Departments Filled With Idiots?
No, they are not. Human Resources as a profession can be an extremely rewarding one, when working for an organization that values the investments it makes – especially its’ workforce. As with any job function in a company there is a broad spectrum of views, performance, self awareness, and emotional competence.
Irregardless of what you think about the Human Resources Department at your company (or previous companies), ABC News’ 20/20 team wants to paint a picture filled with deception, lies, and company agendas with the episode that aired last week (True Confessions) – titled ”Confessions from the Corner Office, Ex-HR Exec Tells All”.
If you didn’t see the show, you can watch the 6 minute interview via YouTube with Cynthia Shapiro (referred to as the former company “hatchet woman”.
In the interview, Shapiro shares:
- A warning to candidates about “traps” with pictures of children on an interviewers desk, and an edict from upper management to not hire moms
- The “let me walk you to your car” trick after the interview
- Once you land a job, prepare yourself for a game of survivor where only your boss knows the rules.
- Your vacation plans can get you on the layoff list, because companies move too fast
- Bosses may put you on the layoff list – for the way you look
- Only Executives get to have gray hair – it’s not fair but that’s how it goes
- Being pregnant isn’t always celebrated
- She was paid big bucks to find gray areas around the laws that would allow companies do what they want to do
- The dirtiest secret of all is company being rarely tell the reason they landed on the layoff list
- HR people may kill her for telling this on TV, but they will “create” documentation
- Her best tip for staying off the companies layoff list, be a brown-noser
I am appalled (to say the least) at what was shared in the interview. Not from a standpoint of whether or not bad things can happen – but from the views as everything Shapiro stated is fact or “truth” for the workforce at large. Take the interviewer example from Shapiro – she knows a (meaning one) HR Director who places fake pictures of kids on her desk as a test.
Sure, we live in a society filled with “you can’t make this sh*t up”, and the HR profession has its’ challenges. Yet this is a perfect example of taking a small percent of problems companies face and pointing the finger at Human Resources given all of “their dirty little secrets”.
What are others saying about Shapiro’s interview across the web and via social channels? Here are a few excerpts (primarily from non Human Resources professionals):
- Much of what was stated is, in my opinion, is very true. They are so guilty of everything.
- The jobs I have gotten, I “forgot” to mention I had kids.
- I have experience this first hand. The EEOC is in cohorts with the employers.
- I was an HR for a Fortune 50 company for 11 years. It is embarrassing to admit that I was HR.
- It is Corporate Resources, clearly not Human.
- I’ve suspected some of the policies Ms. Shapiro exposed, she just verified them.
- I suspect the HR people who are here protesting Ms. Shapiro are unhappy about being “ousted”.
- It has been my experience that Ms. Shapiro is speaking the truth.
- I see that the only ones disagreeing with Ms. Shapiro are the HR spies.
- This was a great piece. Coming from HR, I can attest these practices are alive and well.
- Thank you Ms. Shapiro for this very true, insightful look at what HR is really for.
- HR is not the employees advocate just a spy for the C-level suits.
- So true, especially the HR part, HR is there to protect the company from it’s own employees.
There are obviously several factors that play into whether or not a company an individual works at embraces the concept of a mutually beneficial (employment) relationship.
If you are experiencing any of the examples in the interview, protect yourself and get some legal advice. If not, for your own identity don’t take a victim (the world is out to get me) approach, or point fingers at HR when (maybe) you should look in the mirror and reflect on your own function and field of expertise – and your job performance.
The reality is there are a lot of great companies, and yes, based on all of the comments obviously some bad ones too. An employment relationship is a 2-way street and your performance is the pavement.