I’m surprised at how frequently a job seeker will ask me if recruiters are really looking for candidates on LinkedIn. I’m also surprised how many job seekers still don’t have a presence on LinkedIn. Even if you are not a job seeker, unless you are financially free, chances are good you will be in the next 3 years! What are you waiting for?

Here is some lovely data to back up my assertion.

Results of my 2012 Discussion posed: How much time do you spend on LinkedIn each week, and is it regimented or as needed? If as needed, what is the need that precipitates it?

Though this discussion did not garner significant participation, I feel I made a promise to share the results and I like to keep my promises.

I posted this discussion on 7 different LinkedIn recruiting and human resources groups and received responses from 7 people from 3 different groups (ERE.net, Global Recruiting Alliance, and Purple Squirrel Quest).

• 2 were Certified Internet Recruiters
• 1 was a C-level executive
• 2 owned their own recruiting companies
• 1 was an outsourced HR professional working onsite
• 1 was just a super-savvy recruiter

The consensus was that LinkedIn was something they used daily for at least an hour a day.

Some interesting differences:

• A CIR often used the LinkedIn profile as the primary profile of their candidates, rather than a résumé.
• The savvy recruiter was very focused on using LinkedIn to build a proactive pipeline.
• The C-level executive checked LinkedIn status updates hourly.
• A CIR and one of the business owners cite using LinkedIn’s community features to stay connected to their industry.
• The other business owner used LinkedIn 8-10 hours per day during the week and several hours over the weekend!

Since these results are interesting, but not significant, I wanted to share some data from a report with much more meaningful data. This data is from the Jobvite 2012 Social Recruiting Report

http://bit.ly/SRR13

“Social recruiting not only increases the number of applicants in the hiring pipeline, but also the quality of candidates.”

• 92% of respondents use or plan to use social media for recruiting, an increase of almost ten percent from the 83% using social recruiting in 2010. In 2011 it was 89%.
• 73% have successfully hired a candidate through social networks, making social recruiting a highly effective source of quality new hires. – up from 58% in 2010! 89% of the time, this was through LinkedIn!
• A large majority of recruiters (71%) consider themselves savvy in social recruiting, having a sizeable understanding of what to look for in social profiles.
• 49% of recruiters who implemented social recruiting saw an increase in the quantity of candidates, and 43% noted a surge in the quality of candidates.

So where are they on social media?

• 93% have adopted LinkedIn – up from 78% in 2010!
• 66% on Facebook – up from 55%
• 54% are on Twitter – up fro 45%

That’s still more on Twitter than aren’t on Twitter!

What I would like to know is, what percentage of their time on social media, LinkedIn in particular, is dedicated to what part of the recruiting cycle. If I had to guess, based on how I used to use LinkedIn and train recruiters to use it, it would be broken down as such:

• 10% to blast out job openings (since this doesn’t take much time now)
• 40% to source candidates
• 20% to qualify already sourced candidates
• 20% to compare candidates for interview opportunities
• 10% to compare candidates for offers

Can anyone out there confirm or dispute this?

Since they also do a job seeker report and I have so many job seekers apparently unaware of the frequency with which LinkedIn is depended upon, I wondered how many job seekers are actually hip to the trend.

Firstly, here’s a staggering number – 75%

• 75% of the workforce is looking for a job!
• 48% of those are employed. Both of these numbers are up from last year. 69% of the workforce was job-hunting then and only 35% were employed.
• 61% of those job seekers say job seeking is much harder than it was in 2011.
• 41% of job seekers are unemployed (sounds like a good topic for a vlog!)

So, here it is:

• 44% of unemployed job seekers have a LinkedIn profile.  Say WHAT?!
• 85% are on Facebook (no surprise)
• 51% are on Twitter (that is surprising!)

Even more surprising

• 31% of employed job seekers have a LinkedIn profile!
• 75% are on Facebook
• 31% are on Twitter

Of them all, Facebook was the most likely site to take a candidate out of the running!

Volunteering and organizational memberships were very highly weighted in a job seeker’s favor.

So, there is a meal for thought.

If you don’t know where to start, we have webinars available for this exact reason.

To at least get you going on LinkedIn, go here: http://bit.ly/7daysLI

To make sure that once you are up and running you can be in the right type of action that will help you land sooner based on how recruiters are actually searching, go here: http://bit.ly/3jobsecrets

And by the way – we write LinkedIn profiles that attract unsolicited job offers! Not all of our clients are job seekers, but they sure get sought out, and some even make career advancements they thought were years away! www.charesume.com

😉