No one denies the fact that social media is being used to find jobs, but it’s worth noting that a number of those placements come about when the friends of the job seeker learn (via the social media network) that the individual is looking for a job and help them out. That method of using social media to find a job is quite different from being a recruiter or hiring manager and trying to locate a viable and interested candidate out in the social media stratosphere.
The most recent example of the gap between what social media can provide and obtaining placements is highlighted by the following report from the SF Business Journal.
“Growth for Twitter, the superhot San Francisco microblogging startup, slowed significantly in May, according to the digital traffic measurement firm Compete.
Monthly unique visitors to Twitter rose a mere 1.47 percent, or 285,333, to 19.7 million between April and May, according to Compete. The number of visits increased just shy of 7 percent.
That compares with an increase of monthly visitors of 5.4 million during March and 6.1 million in February.
Compete’s figures follow closely on the heels of a controversial Harvard Business Review study that looked at 300,000 Twitter accounts and found the top 10 percent of Twitter users accounted for over 90 percent of tweets, as postings on the service are called, while over half of the account holders tweeted less than once every 74 days…”
Despite the avalanche of media coverage over Twitter in the past few months it’s noteworthy that once the dust clears the fact remains: At it’s base form, social media is just another way for groups of people to communicate. The questions to ask are: Do your customers use the service you’re trying to reach them with? Are enough of them using the service to make it worth your time?
As a business, the key is to identify and harness relevant information in a way that enables value to be created and generate increased revenues. Currently, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn, and Facebook cover many topics of information and interests other than searching for or finding a job. However, this accumulation of a large amounts of data does not make it easier to identify meaningful information that is of value to recruiters & hiring managers.
Developing an effective way to identify and connect qualified candidates with open positions is the hurdle that needs to be overcome before social media becomes a reliable tool for recruiters.
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