Every time I hear about a company which has used social media for recruiting, I think: ‘So what?’ Often the companies are so well known that they could have put a message in a bottle and recruited someone. On a recent trip to Hawaii I did exactly that, casting the bottle out to sea with the question, ‘do you want a job?’ inside it. Not surprisingly, seven days on I’ve had no response.

The immediate reaction to a failed social media strategy is to assume it was down to poor execution but this is not the case in my experience. Last year, we helped thousands of  jobseekers find a position yet only a handful of these came from Facebook et al. We all need to get a good return on investment from recruitment strategies and in my view this will not be necessarily be gained from social media. 

Some major companies may score a success when using social media to find new talent because their consumer brands are well-known and recruiting strategies translate well to the new channels. For the vast majority of organisations, however, there are far quicker and more cost-effective ways of recruiting staff and employers need to prioritise and focus on these.

Research carried out by recruitment firm Robert Half suggests that social media is not being adopted by recruiters and jobseekers as widely as expected. It found that half of recruiters (52%) and jobseekers (49%) haven’t used social media as part of their recruitment process.

Sure recruitment futurologists extol the virtues of social media. It’s here, it’s happening and we’ll all apparently get left behind if we don’t use it to engage with candidates and create talent communities. I know from experience though that the first place job seekers go is job boards, recruitment agencies and the trade press. 

If you have the time, resources and money to generate talent communities, please go ahead. But remember potential recruits may only be looking for a job within the next three months and then your ‘relationship’ is almost useless. This is particularly pertinent with graduate recruitment: these people are only graduates once and so immediately lose much of their value once placed.

There are benefits to using social media as part of a recruitment strategy. There are even sectors for which it can be highly effective such as marketing, PR and IT because these professions are already using such channels in their everyday work. As a rule though, it needs to be remembered that social media is just another channel, not a panacea to recruitment woes.

Remember, when job boards launched? The headlines were all about the predicted demise of the recruitment agency. But that never happened because some recruiters learnt how to add value for clients and how to adapt and work with the boards. Similarly, since the advent of social media the demise of the job board has been predicted. What we are seeing though is that job boards remain the starting point for job searches and the boards will learn to co-exist and work with social media rather than see it as a threat.

For employers it is all about balance, using each channel to its strength rather than being caught up in the hype of the latest fad. Above all, they need to go where the candidates are and, at the moment, the vast majority of them are still to be found on the job boards.

Geoff Newman is CEO, Recruitment Genius