Social media as job recruitment tool, up in 2012

With the growth of social media sites like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, as well as lesser-known sites — Upspring, PerfectBusiness and Cofoundr — professional networking with the use of social media as a recruitment tool is becoming more prominent.

Most employee recruiters — 92 percent — currently use, or plan to use, social media and networking sites for job recruiting this year, according to the Jobvite 2012 Social Recruitment Survey. This is a 3 percent increase from 2011 and 10 percent increase from 2010.

The most-used social media site, when it comes to recruitment and hiring, is LinkedIn: 89 percent of U.S. businesses have made a hire through it, compared to Facebook at 26 percent and Twitter at 15 percent.

"Social media, on the whole, is becoming a medium for work as well as play," as quoted in a report, "The Impact of Social Media," in 2011 from Nigel Wright Recruitment, a U.K.-based search firm with international influence to help connect highly qualified job candidates with businesses.

The report emphasizes how social networking is changing the nature of recruitment and how "essentially, companies and recruiters need to be where their candidates are in order to engage them in the recruitment process." Deseret News