We are all already aware that social media has quickly become an important part of the recruitment process, whether you're a candidate looking for a job, or a recruiter / client looking up details of a potential placement.
We also know that whilst we are spoilt for choice when it comes to social networking sites (see the below image), the main contenders for recruitment at this particular moment in time are LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.
However, we have heard on the recruitment rumour mill that some recruitment consultants are unsure of where traditional recruitment methods lie now that the online world makes candidate information much more readily accessible. Our answer was reiterated by what the AER (Association of Executive Recruiters) were recently told at an REC conference : it is important to regard social media as a complementary tool rather than a replacement function.
More than 7 million people in the UK now use Twitter, with a large percentage falling into the 18-34 age group. Another 2.6 million are on LinkedIn out
of a global community of more than 50 million. Most users of these
networks are educated to college/university of above, making them ideal
potential candidates for high end recruiters. Brilliant! We wouldn't have known this information about a candidate until they sent in their CV, but now the researchable is available. Traditional recruitment methods are being accelerated by the wealth of information the worldwide web now stores.
So does this make traditional methods redundant? Definitely not. The candidate has control over what information they put up on their Facebook/LinkedIn/etc pages. All this information still has to be validated. It is a lazy recruiter who takes everything for gospel without checking. And if this lazy recruiter placed a candidate without doing relevant checks? You risk jeapordising your agency's (and your own personal) credibility.
So the ever-complex world of business social networking certainly helps us in our jobs, but recruiters should not take advantage of this and take shortcuts whilst navigating the roads of social media.
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