Social Recruiting in the UK: What’s Hot and What’s Not

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Our annual Global Social Recruiting Activity Report, which surveyed 33,800 UK recruiters – in addition to hundreds of thousands of recruiters from the United States, Canada, Australia, India, and China – revealed a whole host of interesting facts and figures when it comes to the social recruiting habits of UK recruiters.

With 2014 shaping up to be the most popular year yet for mobile job posts (up 53 per cent on 2013), it was Twitter that stole the show as the fastest growing network used by recruiters this year.

Let’s take a closer look: 28 per cent of UK recruiters actively use Twitter for job posts compared to only 15 per cent that publicise job posts on Facebook. The average Twitter network of recruiters grew by a whopping 46 per cent this year alone, which is not surprising when you consider Twitter’s own rapid growth in the UK as a whole, increasing from ten million active users in 2013 to nearly 15 million in 2014. Job listings on Twitter had a greater reach and were viewed on average 2.5 times more than the same posts on Facebook.

What does this tell us? Well, LinkedIn can sleep easy knowing it has retained its title as the world’s largest professional network (in fact UK recruiters’ average LinkedIn connections increased 12 per cent from 840 to 940), but Twitter in particular, as well as Facebook, are hot on its heels.

Variety is key – with over 1.2 billion people on Facebook, and Twitter users climbing towards the 300 million mark, more candidates than ever are sourcing jobs via social media. So recruiters that leverage more than just LinkedIn stand the best chance of sourcing the best candidates, the fastest!

And what about the industries that attract more applications via social media? Across all three major social networks, the oil and gas industry posted the most job listings with IT coming in a close second. The finance and banking sector is still trailing behind, which may be indicative of how the different sectors attract candidates, but that’s not to say that social is any less important.

There are plenty more interesting facts and figures in the report which is available to download and read for free here.

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