The Wall Street Journal’s Joe Light has just published a piece about a growing trend in job recruitment circles: trolling Facebook for job candidates. The use of social networks in the employment arena is nothing new, but the noticeable uptick in the use of Facebook for recruitment purposes is.
Facebook has traditionally been viewed as a place for personal connections, where the veneer of workplace formality is rubbed off or not bothered with at all. Jeff Vijungco, who oversees talent recruitment for Adobe Systems, Inc., told the WSJ that job candidates in focus groups reported being keenly disinclined to having recruiters reach out to them through Facebook.
Recruiters, however, are taking a closer look at the network’s advantages: Facebook has the lion’s share of users; people spend more time logged on Facebook than LinkedIn; and folks are, in general, more likely to apply for positions pointed out to them by friends and family than ones glanced at on job boards. Even job boards themselves, like Monster.com, are getting in on the trend — the popular employment site released BeKnown, a Facebook app, this past June.
Jobs2Web, a firm dedicated to keeping tabs on the origins of prospective and actual hires, crunched Facebook’s hire numbers and found that they “account[ed] for less than 1% of the total hires companies are making.” The same company is predicting that Facebook will become a real recruitment force in 2012.
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http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903885604576490763256558794.html