2012 Social Recruiting Survey - jobvite.com

The impact of Social media for recruiting(at least in the US) has progressively become the most dominant factor for many companies to find and hire quality candidates. According to the 2012 annual Social Recruiting Survey from Jobvite:

+ 92% of respondents use or plan to use social media for recruiting, an increase of almost ten percent from the 83% using social recruiting in 2010.

+ 73% have successfully hired a candidate through social networks, making social recruiting a highly effective source of quality new hires.

+ A large majority of recruiters (71%) consider themselves savvy in social recruiting, having a sizeable understanding of what to look for in social profiles.

+ 49% of recruiters who implemented social recruiting saw an increase in the quantity of candidates, and 43% noted a surge in the quality of candidates.

Some other notable findings in the 2012 annual Social Recruiting Survey from Jobvite:

- Facebook is gaining grounds in 2012 with 66% share and Twitter at 54% but the undisputed king of social network recruiting is and continues to be LinkedIn at 93%!

- Since implementing social recruiting, 20% reported taking less time to hire while 49% saw an increase in quantity of candidates and 43% saw an increase in quality of hire.

- 89% of respondents have made a hire thorugh LinkedIn, 26% thorugh Facebook and 15% through Twitter.

- 86% of recuiters are likely to look at social profiles when reviewing candidates

"As recruiters continue to collect more knowledge on social recruiting best practices, the number of quality hires acquired through social media increases. The role candidates’ social activity plays in hiring decisions also grows in importance. Hiring in and of itself has broadened its reach to include a multitude of social media sources as companies continue to seek out new ways to find and hire the best talent". - Jobvite.

Facebook used to screen potential employees!

US - More employers are using social networking sites such as Facebook to screen potential employees, says a new CareerBuilder survey.

Forty-five percent of 2,600 hiring managers report using these networking sites to research job candidates, a huge increase from 22% last year. On top of that, 11% plan to start using these sites for screening.

Out of those that conduct background checks and online searches of job candidates, 29% use Facebook, 26% use LinkedIn and 21% use MySpace. 11% of respondents search blogs, while 7% follow candidates on Twitter.

The industries that screen job candidates via social networking sites or search engines vary; those which are most likely include jobs specialising in technology and sensitive information. For instance, 63% of employers in the information technology industry screen candidates, while 53% in professional and business services do so.

Thirty-five percent of employers report finding content on these social networking sites that caused them not to hire candidates. Some reasons include finding out candidates posted provocative or inappropriate photographs or information, bad-mouthed previous employers, co-workers or clients, and lied about their qualifications. Also, 14% of employers have disregarded candidates because they sent a message using an emoticon, while 16% had refused to hire because candidates used text language in an email or job application.

On the flip side, 18% of employers have found content on social networking sites that made them hire candidates. Most commonly, the candidates' profiles provided a good feel of their personality and fit, or their profiles supported their professional qualifications.

Impact of Recession on Search Firms – Singapore context

Disclaimer: This is a personal weblog. The opinions expressed here represent my own and not those of my employer - Joe Neitham

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Economic slow down, Financial Tsunami, down turn, recession, call it what you like but we seems to be heading for a definite period of persistent rise in uncertainties in the days ahead. We are experiencing what some would even call the worst recession since the Great Depression and the similarities between the Great Depression and the current recession aka Credit Crunch recession are very similar. Much like the credit crunch today, the Great Depression began with a stock market crash and the eventual meltdown of the financial system. The bad news for us is that the current recession is not over yet by anyone’s imagination and the longer the recession prolonged the closer we are to a state of deep and painful depression.

From recruitment perspective, recession does have direct consequences on recruitment plans and the severity of the recession dictates the surge or decline in recruitment activities. We are today probably experiencing the half way point of recession as it is expected to prolong till 2013 as seen from surveys around the globe.

As such, measures taken by different organisation across varied industry, in preparation for the bad times to come, ranges from the mild to the drastic – pay cut, hiring freeze, lay offs and retrenchment are the buzz words today.

Here at home in Singapore we’ve seen and heard of organisation such as CLSA resorting to pay cuts in order to avoid retrenching their staff and in most financial institutions we are seeing hiring freeze (at least in most part of the business) as the norm of the day such as JPMorgan, Credit Suisse, Standard Chartered Bank, etc. Retrenchment as the last resort is underway at DBS (Nov 14, 2008 The Straits Times), Citibank (Nov 19, 2008 Biz Times), HSBC (Wall Street Journal - Nov 17, 2008), Merrill Lynch (Oct 22, 2008 The Straits Times), UBS (Oct 22, 2008 The Straits Times), Standard Chartered Bank (Oct 29, 2008 The Straits Times). I have a feeling that we’ve not seen the last of such retrenchment activities in the banks as mentioned above and some of these banks will continue the next round of lay offs soon if not in the immediate future.

Outside of banks, some of the organisation that has taken lay offs route are Motorola, Nokia, GAP, NOL, AIA, IM Flash Tech., YKK, Allied Technologies Ltd. The list is expected to grow as many organisation need to resort to trimming their staff strength in order to sustain.

In the midst of all the doom and glooms around it is still heartening to know that organisations here such as Singtel and NTUC are declaring not to resort to lay offs, while banks like Barclays, Standard Chartered bank, and ANZ are still hiring actively if not aggressively.

Types of search firms

The past few days I’ve been meeting up with few recruitment consultants and I guess their interpretation of the current recruitment scene varies from one to the other and that’s purely because of the space in which they operate. Typically we have the following types of search firms here in Singapore –

Executive Search Firms: These are the true search firms where they only take on retained search. Typical search firm will have a strong Research team with strong market mapping capabilities and they do not have any particular industry that they limit themselves to but on roles – only senior management level. Some of the leading search firms in Singapore are -
· Egon Zehnder

· Spencer Stuart
· Amrop Hever Group
· Heidrick & Struggles
· Russell Reynolds

Recruitment Consulting Firms (Hybrid – Contingency/Retainer): These are firms that are strong on contingency however most will also take on 10%-20% retainer jobs. Consultants here are strong on end-to-end consulting and 2-5 consultants will share 1-3 researcher (only name generation and market mapping) and in some cases resourcers (Identify and shortlist candidates – email/phone/face-to-face). Focus on middle to senior level candidates. Some of them are -
· Talent2
· Hudson
· Robert Walters
· Derwent
· Korn Ferry

Recruitment Agency (Contingency - Contract/Perm): These are agencies that are typically focused on verticals and most of them are in Information Technology. Traditionally they only do contracting where they outsource engineers to client site and manage their payrolls. Lately, few of these agencies do not wish to miss out on the lucrative contingency business so they have dedicated consultants that only do permanent placements. In such places, often they will have dedicated Sales/Business Development (client facing) team that are supported by strong Resourcers in the back office. Some of the leading agencies are –
· A-IT
· Optimum
· Comtel
· Emerio

Trends in recruitment process

Recruitment Outsourcing:

In the past 2 years alone we have seen a rapid growth in recruitment outsourcing, also known as HRO(Human Resource Outsourcing), RPO (Recruitment Process Outsourcing), TAM (Talent Acquisition Management), etc and basically to quote the Recruitment Process Outsourcing Association

, "Recruitment Process Outsourcing is when a provider acts as a company's internal recruitment function for a portion or all of its jobs. RPO providers manage the entire recruiting/hiring process from job profiling through the on-boarding of the new hire, including staff, technology, method and reporting. A properly managed RPO will improve a company's time to hire, increase the quality of the candidate pool, provide verifiable metrics, reduce cost and improve governmental compliance.”

Some of the organisation that are outsourcing their recruitment functions in Singapore are –
· Credit Suisse to Alexander Mann Solutions
· Barclays to Resource Solutions/Robert Walters -
· Deutsche bank to Alexander Mann Solutions
· UBS to Talent2
· Merrill Lynch to Talent2

Corporate/In-house Recruiters:
For sometime now we’ve had HR folks taking on recruitment as a sub function and unfortunately these does not work well when you are recruiting in volumes. Some of the banks in Singapore that are increasingly relying on in-house recruiters are – ANZ, JPMorgan, Standard Chartered Bank, RBS, etc. Most of these in-house recruiters are from search background with many years of end-to-end recruitment experience under their belts. Obviously, they know what they are doing and they will definitely give some their vendors a run for their money.

Talent management solutions:
Most of the big banks here these days have implemented Talent management solutions in the recruitment process. Some of the leading solutions that are in used here are -

· Taleo (Clients: ANZ, Credit Suisse, JPMC),

· Brassring (Client: UBS),

· Recruitmax (Client: Barclays),

· JobsDB Dimension (Client: SCB).

Preferred Supplier Panel:

Gone are the days when banks will utilise the services of any and every recruitment firms out there. These days’ banks are more selective with whom they want to associate themselves and whose service they would like to avail. Thus was born the Preferred Supplier List or Panel, where out of maybe 70-90 firms only 10-20 are short listed to be included in the panel. Every in-house recruiter as well as the hiring managers is generally mandate to only use those agencies that are in the list.

Banks that uses Talent Management Solutions invariably will have their preferred supplier list and the system will not allow you to submit resumes if you are not in the panel as a registered user.

The future of recruitment industry

As more and more organisation engage on developing their own in-house resource capabilities their focus then will be to hire directly and reduce dependencies on headhunters/recruitment agencies in the long run. Today many in-house recruiters are well equipped and trained on direct sourcing through different mediums for both active and passive candidates – Networking tools(LinkedIn, Facebook, Zoominfo etc), Job site Database search (eFinancialcareers, Monster, etc), Googling (using Boolean strings), etc. What this translates to is substantial lost of requirements for recruitment agencies. The future of recruitment industry therefore will be decided by those firms/agencies that are willing to evolve and adapt to the changing demands of the industry. Added to this, recession will result in the number of jobs being drastically reduced and everyone therefore will be forced to fight for the few jobs that are available and survival will very much depend on getting those few available jobs from the client and filling them.

- Agencies will have reduced job sheets: Fewer jobs due to recession and those that remains most of them will be filled by in-house recruiters. Only hard-to-fill niche or senior roles will be given to agencies.
- Agency to focus on building strong search capabilities: To fill those hard-to-fill niche or senior roles agencies must equip themselves with strong search capability to beat the fierce competition and stand out from the rest.
- Smaller/boutique agencies driven out of business: In the interim smaller agencies who are without any serious requirements will be left out, eventually they will have to close shop due to lack of funds. However, those smaller agencies that are focus on contracting with more than 50 contractors will survive at least for the period when the contract still runs.
- Only the big boys with strong capital reserves will survive: The big Recruitment Consulting firms with diverse portfolio will survive and ride out this rough patch as they are not dependent only on few particular clients in particular industry/sector.
- Strong relationship + strong delivery capability will thrive: In the end, it all boils down to the depth of ones relationship with clients because relationship will help in requirements coming to you. However, relationship alone does not suffice and what will set a survivor apart from the rest will be the strength in their delivery capability – high percentage of successful job filled against number of jobs.

Is your firm geared up and prepared for the long haul and ready to ride out the recession? What plans of actions are being put in place not only to survive but excel in these challenging times?

Should the negative trends continue for the next two quarters number of consultants will find themselves in the deficit from which recovery will be a difficult task. I believe that this will eventually result in many consultants losing their jobs sometime during the end of 2nd and beginning of 3rd quarter of 2009 and many cowboy agencies will also be force out of business. So how each companies responds to these new economic conditions will ultimately “separate the wheat from the chaff”.

On the bright side, experience and big billing consultants will not only survive but continue to do well and for them pots of gold waits at the rainbow’s end and this is what we know as “survival of the fittest”.

PS: Feel free to share with everyone your thoughts and take on this topic by leaving your comments here or you may write in to me confidentially at neitham(at)gmail(dot)com.

***Happy hunting folks***

:: I’m on LinkedIn – Now What??? by Jason Alba

My pal Jason Alba of the renowned Jibberjobber not only has he succesfully conceived, build and run a networking site but now has also added another feather to his cap by becoming a writer and that too on the hot topic of LinkedIn and titled I’m on LinkedIn – Now What???.

I had the honour of browsing through this book before it goes to the publishing house and I believe that anyone who is serious about networking through LinkedIn must grab a copy of this book by pre-order as the book is slated to be released in September.

If you are a professional interested in advancing your career, increasing your business or expanding your opportunities through relationships, this book is for you. It helps you understand and develop an effective online social networking strategy with LinkedIn.

The reader will walk away with:

1. an understanding of LinkedIn and why they should use it
2. a set of best practices and tips to get started and keep moving
3. an understanding of how LinkedIn fits into their networking and career
   strategy