Social Media Recruiting Update: The Impact In 2012 [Infographic]

There has been a very fast evolution of social recruiting over the past few years, and if you’ve watched it, you know it’s been very interesting to follow. We’ve covered it here on Bit Rebels along the way, and it is one of those things that will continue to shape our future. It all happened so fast, and the hiring process before the change is definitely gone forever.

If you’d like a recap, I will give you one here as succinctly as I can. Before Twitter launched (which inspired a ton of other social media services), the only social networks anyone ever talked about were pretty much Facebook and occasionally LinkedIn. However, back then, it hadn’t really clicked in all our minds that we could use those sites as real tools for powerful networking. They were still just social in the primitive sense, and we were still reluctant to meet new people that way (and if we did, we didn’t always take those relationships seriously).

After Twitter launched, a lot of that started to change. We started to see the value in meeting people in social media. Back then, Twitter was a very special place, and you’d probably be surprised how many business deals were closed over Twitter direct messages. A lot of professional bonds were formed (I even met Richard, my partner here at Bit Rebels, on Twitter in early 2009). It was around that time that we first started hearing about companies using Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter as a way to do Social Media Background Checks.

Then about a year ago, Richard wrote what became a very successful 3-part series of articles about how to recruit top talent using social media [part 1, part 2, part 3]. Companies were learning about this along with us, and they started checking the social media profiles of potential hires as fast as those same people could clean them up. Almost overnight it became official – Social Media Job Hunting was a powerful way to find a new career, as well as lose one (if those social media profiles were sloppy and inappropriate).

Today I’d just like to do a follow up on the same topic. As if you didn’t see this coming, our personal lives and our professional lives our all mixed together in social media. That big bundle of loveliness is currently what 92% of companies now use as a major tool when determining if you will be right for the job they have available. 73% say they have successfully hired someone through social media, which is up 10% from just last year. These percentages are huge. The days of presenting yourself in a one hour meeting over lunch are over. Now employers can scan our Facebook profile, and in less than FIVE minutes they can make a determination about us. It’s fast, easy and very efficient.

This is one of those things that our children will grow up knowing from the get go. It will be common sense to them, and they’ll never know any difference. And just like we might tell them someday that we had to carry home heavy books from school everyday since we didn’t have access to the Internet, we’ll also be able to say, “I remember back in the old days when there was no such thing as social media and employers just learned about us by calling our list of five references.” Those days are gone forever. This infographic called The State of Social Recruiting, published by Jobvite, illustrates the update on all this in a quick and easy format. You can click here to get detailed information about their survey, their results, and how they were able to determine these numbers.