Mom, dad, grandpa and grandma are all on social media. Type “dog” into Facebook, and pictures of happy-tailed puppies abound.
But when it comes to companies — specifically, recruiters — 30 percent still say they don’t use social media for talent acquisition, according to a survey by the Human Capital Media Advisory Group, the research arm of Talent Management magazine.
The survey, issued in October 2014, polled 161 humanresources professionals from companies of various sizes and industries.
Of the nearly 70 percent of companies that recruit through social media, 94 percent said they useLinkedIn, 44 percent use Facebook and 42 percent use Twitter, according to the survey (Figure 1).
Source: HCM Advisory Group, October 2014
Companies that don’t use social media to recruit talent may be missing out. As of late 2014, LinkedIn boasts more than 330 million members, while Facebook and Twitter have 1.3 billion and 284 million active users, respectively.
Even though many of these users access social media on a mobile device, most companies in the HCM survey said they have not made their application process mobile friendly. According to the survey, just 36.5 percent of firms have mobile-friendly application websites.
Most companies still use traditional methods of recruiting, such as traditional job boards (78 percent), the survey showed, while a slightly smaller number (62 percent) use niche job boards, and roughly half (53 percent) use job fairs for recruiting.
The survey also revealed that fewer than 40 percent of companies’ talent acquisition functions are “prepared” or “fully prepared” to meet business needs. Specifically, 56 percent said they are “somewhat prepared,” while 7 percent are “not prepared,” the survey shows.
One area of concern is the recruiting and HR staff of the companies surveyed, as 17 percent of respondents claimed that their recruiters and HR staff did not have the skills and competencies needed to do the job.
Background checks are a common step in the hiring process,with 92 percent of companies running background checks on new hires, according to the survey. Perhaps more surprising than the 8 percent of firms that don’t run background checks is the fact that 76 percent only run background checks on new hires, the survey shows. That leaves just 15 percent of organizations that run background checks on current employees.
When it comes to spending, more than half (52 percent) of respondents to the survey said their investment in talent acquisition would not change in 2015, but 40 percent expected to spend more on talent acquisition.
That corresponds to the survey’s findings about expected hiring patterns. About 39 percent plan to maintain the same hiring rate as 2014, while nearly 44 percent plan to increase hiring “somewhat” or “significantly” (Figure 2).
Source: HCM Advisory Group, October 2014
The survey also examined the prevalence of temporary staffing firms, finding that 55 percent of companies use at least one. The most common number was two to three temporary staffing firms, a number that nearly half (47 percent) of organizations reported using in the past year, according to the survey.
The survey also found that only 2 percent of respondents found the quality of their contingent labor to be unsatisfactory. When it comes to benefits, 79 percent of companies in the survey said they don’t offer temporary staffers benefits. For those that do, 10 percent of companies said they provide dental insurance while 12 percent said they provide health insurance, the survey found.
When measuring the quality of the talent acquisition process, the majority of firms (62 percent) look at how long it took to fill the position. The next most important factor is hiring manager satisfaction (46 percent), followed by cost per hire (44 percent) and budget (30 percent) (Figure 3).
Source: HCM Advisory Group, October 2014
On the other hand, when the question framed success in terms of the quality of candidates, different priorities emerged. Hiring manager satisfaction (53 percent), employee attrition reports (49 percent), organizational fit (47 percent), candidates’ first performance review (46.5 percent) and retention rate of top performers (46.5 percent) were the top priorities.
