Restrictive corporate policies and poor organisational understanding of the potential benefits of social media as a recruitment tool mean that many employers are not exploiting the channel as effectively as they could.
According to a global survey of HR professionals undertaken by talent acquisition and management software provider StepStone Solutions, three out of five organisations are already using social media as part of their recruitment strategy and a further 25% plan to do so in the near future.
But 69% said that a general lack of awareness of the benefits was the greatest barrier to successful implementation, while 28% cited corporate policies that restricted access to certain social networking sites as another problem.
StepStone’s chief executive Matthew Parker said that 96% of recruiters felt that social media had a role to play in recruitment as they believed it was a good way to reach potential employees worldwide and could help build new talent pools, especially for high-demand skills such as mobile application developers or managers with experience of emerging markets.
“However, many recruiters aren’t opening Twitter accounts of LinkedIn pages in the absence of clear corporate support. Red tape and a lack of understanding may be harming the uptake of social media despite the fact that recruitment tools with built-in capabilities are there to support them,” he added.
The study also revealed that 82% of job candidates responded positively to contact via social media, while two thirds of respondents indicated that they intended to take on new hires over the year ahead.
A second survey undertaken among 3,000 learning professionals by e-learning software provider SkillSoft found, meanwhile, that social media was no longer exclusively being used by marketing and PR departments to raise brand awareness, but was increasingly being employed for internal collaboration purposes.
Some 49% of respondents said their employer was now using the channel to promote information-sharing between colleagues, while 35% indicated that they were incorporating it into their e-learning programmes.
