Social Media Having Big Impact on Recruiting Landscape

In 1997, Bolt and Six Degrees were the first social networking sites launched. Bolt was a platform for 15-20-year-olds to use for email, voicemail, message boards and instant messaging. Six Degrees was created to help people connect with people they didn’t know.

Today, there are dozens of social networking sites with an estimated 4.9 billion people using social media around the world. Americans spend an average of 2 hours and 14 minutes on social media every day.

In a challenging labor market, social media delivers many benefits to both employers and jobseekers. Social media provides a large and diverse pool of potential candidates for employers, making it easier to find potential employees who are a good fit for particular roles. For jobseekers, social media gives yet another resource to better understand a potential employer and its culture.

Best social channels for recruitment

Four of the most popular social media sites for recruiting are Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and X (nee Twitter).  You may ask, what about LinkedIn? LinkedIn certainly plays a role in recruiting, but not nearly the share of the potential audiences the others are able to reach. By comparison, Facebook garners nearly 50% of all social media visits in the U.S., while LinkedIn gets less than 1% of those same visits.

In terms of sheer visibility, Facebook is clearly the winner with the largest number of users in the U.S. Nearly 245 million people or 70% of the U.S. population use Facebook.  Facebook is the most downloaded app of the last decade.

There are nearly 200 million active monthly Instagram users in the U.S., and 59% of Americans use Instagram every day. Both Facebook and Instagram are owned by Meta.

Snapchat boasts 108 million users in the U.S. and X (Twitter) has 77 million users in the U.S., and more than 20% of U.S. adults have accounts.

How are they different?

With its reach far outpacing its competitors, a valuable feature that Facebook provides is its ability to curate communities of like-minded users with similar interests. There are millions of Facebook Groups where conversations and messages can be targeted. Groups that focus on the supply industry, plumbing, logistics and more have tens of thousands of members each. These can be ripe for targeting jobseekers.

The age of various social media users is also something to consider while recruiting for various roles. Most Instagram users in the U.S. are between the ages of 28 and 43. Snapchat users tend to skew a little younger. About 80% are between the ages of 15 and 35, which means it may be a good channel to build an employer brand for future jobseekers.

With X (Twitter), 42% of users are college graduates compared to the national average of 31%. Also, two-thirds of companies in America with more than 100 employees use X (Twitter) to communicate.

Start using social media for recruiting now!

Gaining a general understanding and starting small is key to success if social media isn’t already part of your recruitment strategy. How companies source, advertise and recruit employees is a dynamically changing model, and social media is the biggest part of that ongoing change.  Using social media has the potential to give a company’s recruitment and employer brand extensive exposure and reach. What’s more, it doesn’t require vast resources to leverage these tools to exponentially boost recruitment efforts.

For more information about social media and recruiting, be sure to check out ASA’s Q4 Review publication (mailed to all ASA member companies and also sent digitally). 

Also, as part of ASA’s Project Talent webinar series, a recording of a recent webinar with more details on social media and recruiting can be found here.

Project Talent is a component of ASA’s Employee Recruitment and Education goal, one of four mega goals included in the association’s strategic plan. This goal includes the objective of developing and implementing a program to attract and grow the number of talented workers taking advantage of fulfilling career opportunities in the PHCP/PVF Industry.