The use of social media for recruiting purposes is getting a lot of attention at the moment, there is a string of upcoming events dedicated to the topic and the blogs are alive with tips on its use. Given the dramatic impact the economic downturn is having on the UK recruitment sector, this seems a little surprising.

Why? Because investing in social media is exactly that, an investment. Granted the costs might not be as visible as other investments, but significant time and effort is required to launch and sustain a social media campaign. This shouldn’t be underestimated; social media projects require ongoing labour resource or they will fail. Labour resources cost money, money which is currently in short supply.

Then there is the ROI factor. In contrast to a few years ago the UK recruitment market has changed significantly; we are in a candidate rich market, with vacancies on the decline and unemployment on the rise. If there was ever a market for the traditional job board approach to deliver it is now, when active candidates are searching for work. The pressures of the marketplace mean job board prices are on the decline, lowering the cost-per-candidate significantly. In contrast, the ROI for social media projects is often an unknown quantity.

So why is social media for recruitment gaining so much attention and why would a company take the risk? Is the UK online recruitment taking a “head in the sand” approach to the current wows? Are we all being too “blue skies” about social recruiting?

In short, No.

Smart recruiters and employers can see social media for what it is, a long-term strategy which done correctly can put a recruitment brand ahead of the competition in the war-for-talent. Just as some businesses understood the benefit of having a company web site long before others did, forward-thinking businesses are seeing the value of having a social media presence well ahead of the crowd. Investing in social media may not be beneficial now (in the down market), but it lays the groundwork now, meaning a company’s recruitment brand is ready for the next upturn.

Yes - the ROI needs to be discussed and established (and it often isn’t discussed enough).

Yes – results are not going to happen overnight, it’s a gradual process of building a recruitment brand.

But Yes - having a social media presence is important.

Is your company laying the social media foundations for the future?

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Search engine giant Google has recently added some significant enhancements to the search experience, with the addition of Search Options. The new functionality allows a user to filter their search results by category and, more importantly, by time. The result for online job seekers? Google-based job seeking just got a lot more interesting.

Why? Well let’s assume you are a job seeker looking for the role of IT Manager in London. A standard Google search would turn up the following results:

The standard results show a range of sites that offer IT Manager Jobs, but very few specific job results for actual vacancies. The standard search is littered with links to job boards who have carefully worked on their SEO to get ranking.

However, click on Google’s new search options tab and filter the search to ‘Recent results’ only and the result is significantly different:

The items listed link directly through to individual vacancies, a far more useful set of results for job seekers. In addition, listings from direct employers creep into the first page of results (for example badenoch and clark where 9th on our filtered list).

So what’s the impact of Google’s latest innovation? In short:

• As people adopt filtering by timeline job boards will see people landing deeper into their content.
• Twitter’s live search capability now has some competition.
• Aggregators and vertical job search engines also have some new competition.
• Google has become a much better job search tool.

How quickly web users will adopt the new functionality is difficult to say, but we expect Google will ensure the functionality is well promoted.

The UK’s online recruitment advertising volumes took a further decline in April, according to the born Job Advertising Index. The index dropped 4 points during the month, down to 51 points.

The low level of the index underlines the current crisis in the online recruitment sector, with more than 91% of the job sites tracked experiencing year-on-year declines.

A year-on-year comparison puts the index 43 points lower than this time last year.

From a sector perspective, Construction and Engineering seem to be worst hit, followed by Finance. Secretarial, Information Technology and Journalism/Print Publishing also join the list of badly hit sectors.

A few job sites did enjoy an improved April: JobTonic, Nursey Jobs and the InPharm were among the sites to experience positive advertising volume growth, month-on-month.

About the born Job Advertising Index
The born Job Advertising Index is a measure of the health of the UK’s online recruitment sector. Every day we monitor the job advertising levels on a broad range of the UK’s leading job boards and each month calculate an index figure that reflects the volume of advertising across the sector as a whole. For more information on index see the born labs.