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Social Media in Recruiting

Using New Channels To Source Talent

Benchmark Research White Paper

Aligning Business and IT To Improve Performance

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Ventana Research – Social Media in Recruiting

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San Ramon, California

November 2011

Ventana Research performed this research to determine attitudes toward using social

media in recruiting and talent management. This document is based on our research

and analysis of information provided by organizations that we deemed qualified to

participate in this benchmark research.

This research was designed to investigate the social media-focused practices and

needs of individuals and organizations and the potential benefits from improving

their existing recruiting and talent management processes, information and systems.

This research is not intended for use outside of this context and does not imply that

organizations are guaranteed success by relying on these results to improve

recruiting or talent management. Moreover, gaining the most benefit from initiating

or improving the use of social media in this area requires an assessment of your

organization’s unique needs to identify gaps and priorities for improvement.

We certify that Ventana Research wrote and edited this report independently, that

the analysis contained herein is a faithful representation of our evaluation based on

our experience with and knowledge of both social media and talent management,

and that the analysis and conclusions are entirely our own.



Table of Contents

Executive Summary ...................................................................................... 6 About This Benchmark Research ................................................................ 10

Methodology ............................................................................................... 10 Qualification ............................................................................................... 10 Demographics ............................................................................................. 11

Company Size by Number of Employees ...................................................... 12 Company Size by Annual Revenue .............................................................. 13 Geographic Distribution ............................................................................. 14 Industry .................................................................................................. 15 Job Title .................................................................................................. 16 Role by Functional Area ............................................................................. 17

Key Insights ............................................................................................... 18 Organizations increasingly use social media tools and systems for recruiting most positions.................................................................................................. 18 Most have much room for improvement in using social media for recruiting. .... 18 Organizations are less permissive in their general policies regarding social media and networking during work hours. ............................................................. 19 Quality of hire is the most important metric for recruiting. ............................. 19 Organizations are more confident in using social media for recruiting than in managing social collaboration and learning. ................................................. 19 Top social networking sites have taken the lead over the corporate career portals for new recruiting. .................................................................................... 19 Human resources professionals are the primary users of social media for recruiting, and they spend the most time sourcing applicants. ........................ 20 Using social media can reduce recruiting and talent management costs, but most organizations are uncertain about the exact impact. ..................................... 20 Most organizations do not pay for social networking as part of recruiting today but might consider doing so. ...................................................................... 21 Most organizations use conventional tools for internal collaboration. ............... 21 Knowledge sharing, collaboration and learning initiatives are primary purposes of social media use in talent management. ...................................................... 21 So far most organizations find only fractions of their new hires through social media sites, and many plan to change how they use them. ............................ 22 Advanced tools, particularly webinars, are starting to gain adoption for collaboration within organizations. .............................................................. 22 Few organizations have adopted software to work with social media for recruiting. ................................................................................................ 23 HR and recruiting organizations usually will fund future investments in social networking technologies. ........................................................................... 23 Organizations will consider deploying recruiting processes in the cloud. ........... 23

What To Do Next ........................................................................................ 24 Assess your organization’s maturity in using social media for recruiting. .......... 24 Review your policies regarding social media and networking during work hours. .............................................................................................................. 24 Use qualitative metrics for social recruiting as well as quantitative ones. ......... 24



Increase confidence in using social media for recruiting and collaboration and learning. .................................................................................................. 25 Ensure that you can perform at least the basics of recruiting on social networking sites as well as corporate portals. ............................................................... 25 Accommodate the needs of human resources professionals, who are the primary users of social media for recruiting. ............................................................ 25 Determine whether social media is having an impact on your recruiting and talent management costs. ......................................................................... 26 Open a dialogue about whether to pay for social networking as part of recruiting. .............................................................................................................. 26 Review the tools your organization uses for internal collaboration. .................. 26 Assess how social media can help you improve talent management. ............... 27 Consider changes that will help you find more new hires through social media and reach other goals. .............................................................................. 27 Evaluate more visual tools for collaboration and interviewing. ........................ 27 Evaluate software dedicated to working with social media for recruiting. ......... 28 Be clear about who will fund future investments in social networking technologies. ........................................................................................... 28 Consider deploying your recruiting processes in the cloud. ............................. 28

How Ventana Research Can Help ................................................................ 29 About Ventana Research ............................................................................ 30 List of Figures 1. Participants by Company Size (Number of Employees) ................................... 12 2. Participants by Company Size (Annual Revenue) ........................................... 13 3. Participants by Region ............................................................................... 14 4. Participants by Type of Industry .................................................................. 15 5. Participants by Job Category ....................................................................... 16 6. Participants by Functional Area ................................................................... 17



By mid-2012 companies expect to be using social media to source 82 percent of the kinds of jobs we inquired about.

Executive Summary Social media, initially created to enable individuals to use the Internet to connect with each other or broadcast their opinions, have taken the world by storm. Hundreds of millions of people use these sites and tools daily to do everything from post family pictures to challenge repressive political regimes. Now businesses are realizing that they too must ride this tidal wave, for both proactive and defensive reasons. Because so many employees are adept at using social media, it provides a ready-made channel for communication, collaboration and decision support. On the other hand, because anyone can comment publicly on a company’s products, services and business practices, they must take steps to monitor and respond to comments and even try to anticipate them, shaping the dialogue while promoting their brands and protecting their reputations. This form of communication is naturally suited to the process of talent acquisition, from posting job announcements online to accepting and evaluating applications, to sharing relevant content with applicants and colleagues and to finding out more about potential hires through their participation in social networking sites. Once employees are on board, internal social media can help companies create talent communities that have the potential to make the whole organization more collegial and productive. They also can be a platform for new approaches to human capital management processes such as performance reviews, promo-tions and training and development. The impact of social media has only begun to be felt in business, but there’s little doubt that it will be forceful. Organizations must take steps to use this technology to their advantage in recruiting and managing talent or risk losing the best and brightest candidates and employees to others that do. Ventana Research undertook this benchmark research to acquire real-world information about levels of maturity, trends and best practices in organizations’ use of social media in recruiting and talent management. It explores how they do this now, how people at various levels feel about the current processes and tools, plans they have to change or improve them, and benefits they hope to gain by doing so. Social recruiting is an emerging trend of which most organizations are aware: 57 percent of participants in this research said that social networking tools are important or very important in recruiting and applicant tracking activities. Almost every organization accesses external social media to augment those efforts; 59 percent use it at least monthly. By mid-2012 companies expect to be using social media to source more than four-fifths (82%) of the kinds of jobs we inquired about, including finance and administration roles, the front office, IT, line-of-business operations and education or learning functions; that will be an increase of 14 percent from current levels of sourcing. Additionally, more than half of participants expressed some level of confidence in their management of their social recruiting processes, although only 7 percent were very confident; this finding suggests that while usage is broad and increasing, organizations are not certain that they are reaping the full benefits from social media in recruiting.



More than one-third (38%) of companies are not confident in the effectiveness of their social recruiting processes.

The research findings show that organizations are moving beyond career portals and job boards to commercial social recruiting tools. While 6 percent of organizations still use corporate portals daily, weekly or monthly, 59 percent of all the social media recruiting that happens every month takes place on LinkedIn (which ranked highest in usage and importance among participants), Facebook or Twitter. Social media tools such as these introduce new ways of sourcing and enable a focus on what companies reported as the most important aspects of recruiting: finding high-quality hires who fit into the organizational culture, improving candidates’ experiences as well as hiring managers’ satisfaction, and reducing time and cost to hire. This benchmark research also uncovered several challenges in processes, technology and information that impede an organization’s ability to benefit from social recruiting. The first of these is procedural and focuses on systems access: 23 percent of organizations actively prohibit social media use and social networking during business hours, yet the majority of these same organizations report that social networking is important to their business for recruiting and talent acquisition. Also, companies reported that they spend most of their time today on sourcing applicants

(58%) and posting job opportunities (49%), rather than on the later, potentially more productive steps in the hiring process. Insufficient information about the impacts of social recruiting on key recruitment measures is another impediment to organizational success with social media tools and technologies. More than one-third (38%) of companies said they are not confident in the effectiveness of their social recruiting processes. Close to one-quarter

reported they do not know the impacts of social media usage on their talent acquisition costs. Similarly, 41 percent do not know what percentage of recent new hires were sourced with social media. These findings demonstrate the need for more education on how organizations use social media in recruiting and how to improve processes to deliver tracking, metrics and results from social recruiting. Most organizations still use conventional technologies not specifically designed to support social recruiting. Almost half use their existing applicant tracking system, and 16 percent use their human resources management system. More than one-fourth (26%) rely upon spreadsheets and documents for tracking purposes. Such manual processes cannot enable full exploitation of the dynamic and often real-time opportunities that develop while interacting with candidates in social media environments. Along with unfamiliarity with the new environment, these technology impediments bear some responsibility for the relatively few actual hires sourced from external social sites: 55 percent of participants recruited fewer than one-quarter of their new hires in the past three months through social media sites. The research finds that only 15 percent of organizations are satisfied with their current efforts in social recruiting, indicating a market ready for rapid growth. This is underscored by the findings on the main reasons organizations will change the way they use social tools: to identify new talent pools (cited by 81%), gain competitive advantage (75%), improve recruiting processes (67%) and develop the talent



The main reasons organizations will change the way they use social tools are to identify new talent pools (cited by 81%), gain competitive advantage (75%), improve recruiting processes (67%) and develop the talent pipeline (58%).

pipeline (58%). All of these are innovations or improvements not feasible using traditional HR tools and processes. Large majorities of those considering new technology reported that the capabilities they want from social recruiting software are to help them post jobs to social media sites (85%), promote their employer brand on those sites (80%) and track sourcing and referral information (73%). Given that the majority of time now spent on social recruiting is taken up by sourcing and posting jobs, these findings come as no surprise. However, these priorities do not square with the top measures participants identified as their criteria for effective recruiting: quality of hire, cultural fit and others. Capabilities that could help in these areas, such as providing for hiring manager feedback or ratings on candidates (46%) and having a virtual interview management system (43%) ranked low, an indicator of immaturity and lack of understanding of the innovative potential of social recruiting; people look to new systems first to address existing issues they now have to deal with. For these and other reasons, our Maturity Index analysis found only one in five organizations (19%) to be Innovative, the highest of our four maturity levels, while more than twice that many (41%) rank at the lowest Tactical level. Among the four categories in which we assess maturity, the fewest organizations are mature in Process (43% Tactical vs. only 7% Innovative) and Technology (55% Tactical vs. 18% Innovative). They are most mature in the People category (18% Tactical vs. 36% Innovative), largely because of recognizing the importance of social media in recruiting and willingness to use it. When asked about their organization’s openness to begin paying for social media tools and services, half of participants were unsure, indicating that the volume of work is manageable with current free versions (48%). Those that said they would not pay cited concerns about the efficacy of social recruiting such as poor candidate quality (43%), unreliability (30%) and the lack of integration with core recruiting systems (26%). Overall, we believe there is an op-portunity for companies that use social me-dia in recruiting to examine and perhaps reconsider how they are measuring their recruiting effectiveness, and also to align their software requirements to ensure that features can improve business outcomes, not just make current processes more ef-ficient. The research also reveals that more com-panies are using internal social collabora-tion tools to improve their talent management processes. Knowledge sharing, collaboration and learning are the areas in which most reported benefits from social tools. But here again the tools in use are conventional: company intranets, Microsoft Outlook (email) and SharePoint, webinars and internal online communities. Despite the high value placed on internal collaboration tools and relatively frequent access by users (46% access these tools at least monthly), fully half of the



organizations participating in this research indicated they are not encouraging and managing informal social collaboration and learning very well; another one-third said they are doing only “OK.” Here as well, high activity levels are not necessarily producing significant business results: For example, fewer than 5 percent reported that the majority of their promotions were identified with internal social tools. In addition, most participants said they don’t know if these social talent processes have an effect on their talent management costs. In social talent management, as in social recruiting, advances in technology and processes are required to determine the full potential to be gained from these tools. Our research shows opportunity for HR and Recruiting to take the lead in these social initiatives across the organization. These are the groups that most often will fund technology investments (45%). Software as a service (SaaS, 23%) is the deployment model of choice by a small margin in those with a deployment preference (which, however, 38% do not have); SaaS can free HR and Recruiting leadership from complex IT support and cost concerns over implementation and maintenance. Incorporating social media into recruiting and talent management has the potential to change people processes for all involved, from individuals to enterprises. To use these increasingly popular communication channels with success, though, organizations need to be clear about the objectives they are looking to achieve, to involve all pertinent people in supportive processes and to adopt tools that can help provide complete information and interactive capabilities. The day of social media has dawned; smart companies will prepare themselves for it as soon as possible.



About This Benchmark Research Methodology Ventana Research conducted this benchmark research over the Web from July through September 2011. We solicited survey participation via e-mail blasts, our website and social media invitations. E-mail invitations were also sent by our media partners and by vendor sponsors. We presented this explanation of the topic to participants prior to their entry into the survey:

What began as a way for individuals to use the Internet to connect with each other or broadcast their opinions to the world has become a significant form of public – “social” – discourse and learning. Businesses are scrambling to catch the wave and explore ways to take advantage of social media to gain access to the most qualified pool of candidates. This benchmark research is designed to provide broad-based, authoritative analysis of the use of and interest in integrating social media into both acquiring talent and generating candidates to improve an organization’s recruiting processes.

We included the following definitions:

Social Media – Websites or Internet-using services that enable social interaction Social Networking – The process and practice of interacting with others, typically using social media, to communicate and share information Social Recruiting – Sourcing and hiring talent via social networks Talent Acquisition and Generation – Identifying, sourcing and reviewing candidates as part of the recruiting process.

The following promotion incented participants to complete the survey:

All qualified participants will receive a report on our benchmark research findings and a quarterly membership to the Ventana Research Community valued at US$125 or €92. In addition, all qualified participants will be entered into a drawing to win a benchmark research report of your choice valued at US$995 or €732. If you’re one of the first 50, we’ll even throw in a Starbucks card loaded with $5. All those individuals who cannot receive a gift for participation will instead have a donation made to a nonprofit organization.

Qualification We designed the research to assess the use of and plans for deployment of social media in recruitment and talent management. Qualification to participate was presented as follows:

This survey is designed for HR, recruiting and business managers who acquire, develop and retain talent for their organization or are involved with the purchasing of social marketing tools, systems or services for talent acquisition and management. Solution providers, software vendors, consultants, media and systems integrators may participate



in the survey, but they are not eligible for incentives and their input will be used only if they meet the qualifications. Incentives are provided conditional on provision of accurate contact information including company name and company email address.

Further qualification evaluation of respondents was conducted as part of the research methodology and quality assurance processes. It entailed screening out responses from companies that are too small, questionnaires that were not materially complete, or those where the submission is from an inappropriate submitter or appears to be spurious.

Demographics We designed the survey used for this research to be answered by executives and managers across a broad range of roles and titles working in organizations. We deemed 258 of those who clicked through to this survey to be qualified to have their answers analyzed in this research. In this report, the term “participants” refers to that group, and the charts in this section characterize various aspects of their demographics and qualifications.



Company Size by Number of Employees We require participants to indicate the size of their entire company. Our research repeatedly shows that size of organization as measured by number of employees is a useful means of segmenting companies because it correlates with the complexity of processes, communications and organizational structure as well as the complexity of the IT infrastructure. In this research, participants represented a broad range of organization sizes: About half the companies they work in are larger, and the other half are on the smaller side. One-fifth are very large companies (having 10,000 or more employees), about three in 10 are large companies (with 1,000 to 9,999 employees) or midsize companies (with 100 to 999 employees), and somewhat less than one-fifth are small companies (with fewer than 100 employees). This distribution is consistent with prior benchmark research and our research objectives and provides a suitably large sample from each size category.

Figure 1 Participants by Company Size (Number of Employees)

Source: Ventana Research

Small 16%

Midsize 33%

Large 31%

Very Large 20%



Company Size by Annual Revenue When we measured size by annual revenue, the midsize category lost more than half its share, and the small more than doubled to go from having the fewest to the most of all. By this measure, 6 percent fewer are very large companies (having revenue of more than US$10 billion), 3 percent fewer are large companies (having revenue from US$500 million to US$10 billion), 18 percent fewer are midsize companies (having revenue from US$100 to US$500 million), and 27 percent more are small companies (with revenue of less than US$100 million).

Figure 2 Participants by Company Size (Annual Revenue)


Small 43%

Midsize 15%

Large 28%

Very Large 14%



Geographic Distribution In this research all but 5 percent of the participants were from companies located or headquartered in North America. Those based in Europe accounted for 3 percent and in Asia Pacific and Central and South America for 1 percent each. While less diverse than usual, this result was in keeping with our basic expectations at the start of this investigation, since organizations participating in our research most often are headquartered in North America. However, many of these are global organizations operating worldwide.

Figure 3 Participants by Region


North America, 95%

Europe, 3%

Asia Pacific, 1%

Central and South

America, 1%



Industry The companies of the participants in this benchmark research represented a broad range of industries, which we have grouped into four general categories and a miscellaneous one, as shown below. Companies in services accounted for nearly half of participants. They were followed by those in manufacturing (25%) and finance, insurance and real estate (FIRE, 13%). Government, education and nonprofit organizations and others accounted for the balance of 15 percent.

Figure 4 Participants by Type of Industry


Manufacturing 25%

Finance, Insurance, Real Estate

13%

Services 46%

Government, Education, Nonprofit

11%

Other 4%



Job Title We asked participants to choose from among 13 titles the one that best describes theirs. We sorted these responses into four categories: executives, management, users and others. More than seven in 10 identified themselves as having titles that we categorize as users, a grouping that includes senior manager or manager (33%), director (25%) and staff (12%). About one-tenth are executives, and one-eighth are management, by which we mean vice presidents. The remaining 7 percent have other titles.

Figure 5 Participants by Job Category


This is how we aggregated the 13 title response options:

Executive CEO, President COO or Head of Operations CFO or Head of Finance Other CxO Management EVP or SVP VP User Director Senior Manager Manager

Executive 9%

Management 12%

User 72%

Other 7%



Analyst (Business, Financial, etc.) Staff Other Consultant Professor or Teacher

We concluded after analysis that this response set provided a meaningfully broad distribution of job titles.

Role by Functional Area We asked participants to identify their functional area of responsibility as well. This enabled us to identify differences between participants according to their roles in the organization, as shown below. The largest group, more than two-thirds, identified themselves as working in Human Resources; 7 percent are in Training, and 5 percent are executives. Seven other functions, each at 2 percent, accounted for 14 percent of the total; along with 10 other areas, each with 1 percent orless, they make up the Other category.

Figure 6 Participants by Functional Area


Human Resources, 69%

Training, 7%

Executive / Management, 5%

Other, 17%



Key Insights Our benchmark research yielded the following important general findings and key insights regarding the use of social media, processes and technologies in recruiting and managing talent. (We discuss the maturity levels of this market in the Maturity Index portion of the full research report; the actual questions asked in our survey are in the Appendix to the research report.)

Organizations increasingly use social media tools and systems for recruiting most positions. This benchmark research finds that almost every participating organization (93%) uses Web-based social media in recruiting new employees. In addition, 56 percent incorporate internal collaboration tools and processes into their talent management initiatives. These adoption rates correlate to the level of importance organizations place on social processes: More than half of all participants said that social recruiting is important or very important to their organizations, and only 10 percent said it is not important for them. While this was generally consistent across all industries, it is notable that government and nonprofit agencies said that social tools are not relevant to their recruiting processes twice as often as companies in other industries, even though their policies around social media access are consistent with others. The research finds a willingness to use social media regardless of the type of position being filled. Among five general categories we asked about, the most (56%) said they currently use it to hire in finance and administration, but the front office, IT and operations all garnered more than 50 percent, and 49 percent use social media for the category of education and learning. From 19 percent to 23 percent plan to use it soon (within six months), and another 10 percent to 16 percent with a year. Thus in a short time social media will be a ubiquitous tool for business recruiting.

Most have much room for improvement in using social media for recruiting. As part of our benchmark research, Ventana Research assesses the maturity of organizations in four categories: people, processes, information and technology. In areas where technology is well established, we often find that organizations struggle to bring their employees’ understanding and their business processes up to the levels of sophistication of the information and tools they use. In this emerging area, that is not the case. Our Maturity Index analysis finds organizations to be most mature in the People category, where more than one-third (36%) reach the highest Innovative level, substantially more than the next-most mature category, Information (24%). In this research, participants are least mature in Technology. This category has highest percentage of the four, 55 percent, at the lowest Tactical level. The Process category follows closely behind, with 43 percent Tactical and a mere 7 percent Innovative. More than half of participants in this benchmark research view social media as important for recruiting, and roughly the same percentage use it for that. But wielding the right tools effectively eludes many of them, as most still employ tools designed for other uses, such as spreadsheets and HRMS or applicant tracking software. And in process terms, so far the use of social media is sporadic and doesn’t produce strong results: More than half (55%) said that just 25 percent or less of new hires in the last three months came through this channel.



Organizations are less permissive in their general policies regarding social media and networking during work hours. Despite the importance of these tools and the prevalence of their use, 23 percent of organizations have policies that actively prohibit accessing social media tools and networking sites (such as LinkedIn, Twitter, posting blogs and other online networks) during work hours. Those in management (that is, vice presidents, 80%) most often said there is a prohibition against such use. Nonetheless, more than half of all participants said their organization has a policy that allows their use. We conclude from the high adoption rates that access is available to at least some individuals even in the more restrictive organizations, likely in order that they can benefit from the broader talent pools and candidates available via the social networking forums. These research findings suggest that when this technology is used for a targeted purpose, organizations are more comfortable than when use could be indiscriminate.

Quality of hire is the most important metric for recruiting. Participants overwhelmingly chose quality of hire (88%) as their most important recruiting metric overall, and nearly as many (79%) said that this is the most important metric in determining the value of using social media for this purpose. Cultural fit of candidates ranked second in both cases (68% in general, 66% for social media value). The source of the hire is important to only one-third (32%) of organizations in either case, suggesting that little bias exists against using the new channel of social media. Source of hire is important to nearly half (48%) of those in manufacturing companies, but only 22 percent in the Finance, Insurance, Real Estate (FIRE) sector said it is. Time to hire is important to more large (72%) and very large (60%) organizations than to small (33%) and midsize (40%) ones.

Organizations are more confident in using social media for recruiting than in managing social collaboration and learning. Almost three in five (57%) organizations expressed some degree of confidence that they manage their social recruiting effectively. As further evidence of this confidence, almost three-quarters (74%) reported that they either use external social media sites to recruit all job functions we asked about or will do so within six months. When it comes to encouraging and managing informal collaboration and learning, though, half of organizations said they do not do it very well. This gives cause for concern because the top three priorities for utilizing social media in talent management are knowledge sharing, collaboration and learning. It is notable that when asked about the talent management areas that benefit from the use of social tools, a significantly large number of companies (27%) said there are none. Coupling this with the finding that 43 percent of companies do not know how social media impacts their talent management costs, we conclude that users of these tools and processes are not being provided with the metrics and identifiable business outcomes that would increase confidence in social talent management.

Top social networking sites have taken the lead over the corporate career portals for new recruiting. Almost three-fifths (59%) of all the social media recruiting that happens on a daily, weekly or monthly basis is done via the top three social media channels (LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter), far outpacing the usage of company portal career sites. As the resource cited as the most important and used by 87 percent of organizations, LinkedIn is the dominant recruiting resource; three-fourths of companies use it on at



least a monthly basis. However, the second-most important site (named by 47%) is the company’s own career portal or online community, and nearly as many (46%) use it on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. The ability to post jobs to networking sites is the top requirement for users of social recruiting software. When asked about the capabilities they seek in social recruiting software, 85 percent of organizations predictably said that such software should be able to post jobs on social media sites. This is the task in which almost half (49%) of participants spend most of their time while using those sites, and so ensuring efficiencies in this process is paramount. The ability to promote the employer’s brand on external social media sites was the second-highest software priority (chosen by 80%). More than half (57%) said that they want mobile access in this software, enabling those involved in recruiting to review candidate information at any time. Currently the least desired capability is virtual interview management (43%), but this could grow in importance as more organizations focus on mobile process management and adopt virtual meeting and video tools.

Human resources professionals are the primary users of social media for recruiting, and they spend the most time sourcing applicants. More than two-thirds (69%) of participants identified their functional area of responsibility as Human Resources, and the research finds that they are the main ones using social media to procure talent. In nearly half of organizations (46%) two or three people manage this process, and in an additional 28 percent a single employee does so. Thus we conclude that at this point social media-based recruiting is not a team activity. The amount of time people spend using social media sites varies; one-fifth spend one to two hours a week, nearly as many spend three to five hours (17%), and 15 percent spend five to 10 hours. On the high end, another 20 percent spend more than 10 hours a week, while at the low end only 9 percent spend less than one hour. So more than one-third of organizations invest what amounts to about one full workday per week in wielding social media as a recruiting tool. As for how they spend that time, it most commonly (by 58%) is used to source applicants. Ranking second (49%) is initiating the process by posting job opportunities. And reviewing applicants is third (41%). Actually interacting with applicants consumes less of these professionals’ time: Only about one-third (36%) spend most of the time communicating with them, and even fewer share content (16%) or request referrals (15%). For this purpose, therefore, the definition of “social” is likely to be different than for the population at large.

Using social media can reduce recruiting and talent management costs, but most organizations are uncertain about the exact impact. By using social media sites and/or services in their recruiting efforts, more than one-third (36%) of organizations have reduced their talent acquisition costs, 8 percent significantly. Only 7 percent have experienced slight increases. Optimizing time to hire and cost per hire ranked fifth (chosen by 41% each) in the list of metrics organizations use to measure the value of external social media sites and services, yet almost one-quarter (23%) of organizations don’t know whether their talent acquisition costs have actually increased or decreased as a result of the use of social tools, and 34 percent said they have seen no impact. These responses raise the question of whether most organizations have the right measures in place to fully



understand the impacts on costs. The same question arises in the area of talent management, as 43 percent of companies reported they do not know if there have been impacts, positive or negative, on their talent management costs resulting from the use of internal social and collaboration tools. Similar to the numbers reported above, about one-third (31%) reported no impact, while 21 percent reported decreases in costs and 6 percent reported increases.

Most organizations do not pay for social networking as part of recruiting today but might consider doing so. A substantial majority (71%) of organizations are using free versions of social media sites and services in their recruiting initiatives. If required, however, more participants said they would be willing to pay for such sites and services (31%) than would not pay (20%). More revealing is that 49 percent do not know whether they would be willing, which we take as an indication that most organizations have not yet determined the value of these new tools. It is notable that 40 percent of those who are accessing these services for free today do not express confidence that they are effectively managing their social recruiting, perhaps suggesting the strategic value of moving to a cost-based model that provides more support. Of the one in five organizations unwilling to move from free to paid services, nearly half (48%) said they would not because they don’t expect a significant increase in hiring. Other barriers to moving to a paid model included concerns over poor candidate quality (43%; as noted previously, this is the number-one driver of social and traditional recruiting measures) as well as the unreliability (30%) of social sites and services and lack of integration with existing talent acquisition systems (26%).

Most organizations use conventional tools for internal collaboration. We also looked at how organizations pay for internal collaboration. Largely because of the multipurpose nature of the most common forms of such tools (email, content management systems, tools for producing webinars or virtual meetings), the majority of organizations are paying for their use. Almost half (45%) are not sure if they’d be willing to pay for dedicated collaboration tools, citing concerns over productivity loss, too many unqualified applicants not being filtered, unclear support for talent mobility initiatives, and lack of integration between the social media sites and existing talent acquisition or talent management applications. Clearly, this is a market still emerging, of which the benefits are not widely understood and sought. Taking these two views together (external collaboration for recruiting and internal collaboration for other talent management processes), we conclude that roughly 30 percent of all companies are or would be willing to pay for internal or external social media if required, which indicates a growing sense of the importance of social media services.

Knowledge sharing, collaboration and learning initiatives are primary purposes of social media use in talent management. The workforce metric judged most important for talent management activities is employee satisfaction and engagement (chosen by 69%), followed by retention rates (62%) and leadership development (58%). Fostering collaboration, learning and knowledge are the talent management areas in which companies look to social media software and services to have an impact in the workplace. However, most companies have low usage rates of these social tools; almost half of HR (49%) and training (47%) personnel spend only two hours or less utilizing these tools. Likewise, the



average employee outside of HR or Training also spends two hours or less per week on these tools. In terms of their talent management goals, organizations focus on information sharing: 49 percent of companies said that social media software helps with knowledge sharing, 37 percent cited improved internal collaboration, and 34 percent said social tools help with learning. On the other hand, fewer than one-fourth currently use these tools for onboarding or training (23% each), and fewer than one in six use them for succession planning, performance reviews, workforce planning or mentoring. Executives tend to rate these tools less highly than do managers, and HR professionals less highly than those in the areas of training, education, product management and sales. Education about potential benefits thus could spur adoption.

So far most organizations find only fractions of their new hires through social media sites, and many plan to change how they use them. The research indicates that most organizations are not yet realizing major recruiting benefits from the use of social media. More than half (55%) had sourced just one-fourth or fewer eventual hires through this channel in the three months preceding our study; only 8 percent had sourced half or more of their new hires this way. We see this as a sign that most organizations are still getting up to speed in social recruiting; that nearly one in five (19%) don’t know how many they have sourced adds credence to this conclusion. The research offers a corollary in the finding that half of companies plan to change the way they use social tools in the near future; another one-fourth (26%) reported that changes are needed but are not a priority at this time, while only 15 percent said they are satisfied with how they use social media sites now. The expectations for this new recruitment channel are revealed in participants’ reasons for changing: 81 percent said they hope to identify new talent pools, three-fourths seek a competitive advantage, two-thirds will change to improve their recruiting processes, and 58 percent want to improve development of the talent pipeline. All of these motivations are forward-looking and driven by business goals; they do not seek merely to do the same things in a different way. We take this as an indication of the promise of social media for recruiting as well as an acknowledgement that adopting it is a necessity for businesses.

Advanced tools, particularly webinars, are starting to gain adoption for collaboration within organizations. The benchmark research reveals that organizations view established tools as the most important: Microsoft Outlook or Microsoft SharePoint is very important to 47 percent, and company intranets are very important to almost as many (46%). Small organizations place a higher emphasis on SharePoint, with midsize and larger organizations rating company portals highest, closely followed by SharePoint. Interestingly, next in importance to these tried-and-true approaches to information sharing and communication is the use of webinars – virtual meetings, live communication and education that typically is recorded and available for future playback. More than half (55%) of organizations rate webinars as important or very important to their collaboration strategies, and another 23 percent indicated they are somewhat important; only 19 percent of organizations do not use webinars for internal talent management purposes. High-quality video capability has increased significantly in recent years, and while only 9 percent rank video usage as very



important for talent management, 26 percent rank it as important, which far outpaces the importance companies assign to other emerging collaboration tools such as wikis, blogs and other enterprise collaboration tools.

Few organizations have adopted software to work with social media for recruiting. In terms of software to identify and recruit applicants from social media sources, organizations are making do with what they have. Only 16 percent have a dedicated application for recruiting across job boards and social media; the rest work with their existing applicant tracking software (49%), manual tracking with spreadsheets and documents (26%) or their human resources management system (HRMS, 16%). A fraction (14%) use nothing at all. We expect that as companies better understand the uses and value of social media here they will take steps to acquire systems that can help them gain the forward-looking benefits noted above. When they do, the capability they will look for first is usability – whether the software meets their business needs; 77 percent said this is a very important consideration. About two-thirds each rated as very important functional capabilities (66%), reliability in performance and scalability (64%) and manageability of administration and security (63%). As well, more than half (57%) will consider satisfying their cost and benefit requirements very important. People in general expect social media to be user-friendly, and business people involved in the talent search are seldom technically inclined, so we expect potential customers to insist on these qualities when they look for products to assist them in this area.

HR and recruiting organizations usually will fund future investments in social networking technologies. The research shows that the HR and recruiting budgets will be the predominant funding source in 45 percent of organizations’ future purchases of social networking technology. The traditional pattern of IT serving as the source of technology funding doesn’t hold here, as only 10 percent plan to fund such investments from the general IT budget and only 5 percent from a line-of-business IT budget. In about one-quarter (26%) of organizations, lines of business will share funding costs or those costs will be covered out of the general business fund. In 46 percent of small organizations, which often lack the extensive budgeting of larger ones, the general business budget will be the source. Overall, the second-most-common response to this question was “don’t know,” which again suggests that a substantial portion of organizations have not gotten far in planning for adoption of social technologies.

Organizations will consider deploying recruiting processes in the cloud. The research found a similar indecision regarding how companies wish to deploy social media-enabled software for talent acquisition: The largest portion, 38 percent, expressed no preference. Likely because people associate social media with the Internet, deployment through software as a service (SaaS, 23%) and hosting by the supplier (20%) both outranked the traditional model of on-premises deployment (19%). The trend toward cloud deployment bodes well for HR and Recruiting buyers in that they will have to deal less with capital budgets and internal IT support as cost structures move from software purchases to services contracts. Again, we see that many organizations have not gotten very far in this process.



What To Do Next Almost every organization participating in this benchmark research uses Web-based social media in recruiting new employees. In addition, 56 percent incorporate internal collaboration tools and processes into their talent management initiatives. Most also say it is important to do these things: More than half called social recruiting important or very important, and only 10 percent said it is not important for them. And most use it to recruit across the lines of business, for finance and administration (56%), the front office (53%), IT (53%), operations (52%) and education and learning positions (49%). Most of the rest plan to begin using it within a year. For organizations using social media in recruiting or talent management, or considering whether to do so, we offer the following recommendations.

Assess your organization’s maturity in using social media for recruiting. Of the four categories in which we assess the maturity of organizations, this research finds participants to be most mature in the People category (36% at the highest Innovative level), somewhat less so in Information (24% Innovative) and least in Technology and Process, for which the largest portions are at the lowest Tactical level (55% and 43%, respectively). More than half of participants view social media as important for recruiting, and about as many use it for that; these are signs of maturity in the People category. But most use tools designed for other purposes, and they don’t use them very often or with great success: More than half (55%) said that just 25 percent or less of new hires in the last three months came through social media. Comparing your own organization’s attitudes, practices and tools to these participants’ can provide guidance on where to concentrate your efforts in using social media to help find and attract the best candidates.

Review your policies regarding social media and networking during work hours. More than half of all participants said their organization has a policy that allows accessing social media tools and networking sites during work hours, but 23 percent of organizations have policies that actively prohibit it. We counsel against a one-size-fits-all policy here; instead, craft one that bars frivolous use unrelated to work but permits selected employees to use this valuable tool for targeted purposes. In this case, doing so will enable recruiters to benefit from the broader talent pools and candidates available via social networking forums.

Use qualitative metrics for social recruiting as well as quantitative ones. Organizations overwhelmingly identified quality of hire (88%) as their most important recruiting metric overall, and nearly as many (79%) said that this is the most important metric in determining the value of using social media for recruiting. Cultural fit of candidates ranked second in both cases. Participants rated time to hire and cost of hire as substantially less important, although this varies with the size of the business; time to hire is more important to large and very large organizations, which hire in greater volume than small and midsize ones. Nevertheless, evaluating social recruiting performance using qualitative measures likely will benefit the business more than evaluating it on the basis of efficiency alone.



Increase confidence in using social media for recruiting and collaboration and learning. Only one-fourth of organizations said they are confident or very confident that they manage their social recruiting effectively; larger numbers reported they are only somewhat confident or not confident. Similarly, when it comes to encouraging and managing informal collaboration and learning, half of organizations said they do not do it very well. We conclude that many organizations are not sufficiently familiar with and knowledgeable about social media applied to these business processes, and so we recommend exploring how they are designed to work and how they can benefit the business. The current lack of understanding is reflected in the research findings that more than one in four participants (27%) said there are no talent management areas that benefit from the use of social tools, and that 43 percent of companies do not know how social media impacts their talent management costs. Taking a proactive stance therefore could give your organization an edge over its competitors.

Ensure that you can perform at least the basics of recruiting on social networking sites as well as corporate portals. Almost three-fifths of all the social media recruiting that happens on a daily, weekly or monthly basis is done via the top three social media channels (LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter); three-fourths of companies use LinkedIn on at least a monthly basis. But the second-most important site (named by 47%) is the company’s own career portal or online community. The ability to post jobs to networking sites is the top requirement for users of social recruiting software. That is also the capability they seek most in social recruiting software, cited by 85 percent, and a task in which almost half (49%) of participants spend most of their time while using those sites. We therefore recommend that you ensure that at a minimum the software you use allows efficient posting of job openings to both internal and external sites. Beyond that, we recommend as immediate targets for software capabilities the ability to promote your brand on external social media sites, which was chosen as the second-highest software priority, and being able to source applicants, which is the activity in which people spend the most time in social recruiting. Looking ahead, you likely will want mobile access to this software and perhaps virtual interview management as well.

Accommodate the needs of human resources professionals, who are the primary users of social media for recruiting. More than two-thirds of participants identified their functional area of responsibility as Human Resources, and the research finds that they are the main ones using social media to procure talent. In nearly half of organizations two or three people manage this process, and in an additional 28 percent a single employee does so. Thus we conclude that at this point social media-based recruiting is not a team activity. The amount of time people spend using social media sites varies; one-fifth spend one to two hours a week, nearly as many spend three to five hours, and 15 percent spend five to 10 hours. On the high end, another 20 percent spend more than 10 hours a week, while at the low end only 9 percent spend less than one hour. So more than one-third of organizations invest what amounts to about one full workday per week using social media as a recruiting tool. Evaluate the competence and workloads of your users, and consider whether your organization is devoting enough time, people and resources to make this effort successful.



Determine whether social media is having an impact on your recruiting and talent management costs. By using social media sites and/or services in their recruiting efforts, more than one-third of organizations have reduced their talent acquisition costs, 8 percent significantly. Only 7 percent have experienced slight increases. Optimizing time to hire and cost per hire ranked fifth in the list of metrics organizations use to measure the value of external social media sites and services, yet almost one-quarter of organizations don’t know whether their talent acquisition costs have increased or decreased as a result of the use of social tools, and an additional 34 percent said they have seen no impact. Decide how important it is to use social recruiting to reduce costs, then find ways to measure the extent to which that is happening. Do the same in the area of talent management, where 43 percent of companies reported they do not know if there have been impacts on their talent management costs resulting from the use of internal social and collaboration tools and about one-third reported no impact.

Open a dialogue about whether to pay for social networking as part of recruiting. A substantial majority (71%) of organizations are using free versions of social media sites and services in their recruiting initiatives. While more participants said they would be willing to pay for such sites and services (31%) if required than would not pay (20%), half do not know whether they would be willing, which we take as an indication that most organizations have not yet determined the value of these new tools. As social networking becomes established as a business tool, having to pay becomes likely, and organizations should address the possibility. The research shows that 40 percent of those who are accessing these services for free today do not express confidence that they are effectively managing their social recruiting; if that’s the case with your organization, it might be worthwhile to pay for a tool that provides more support to improve effectiveness and metrics to measure it. Of the one in five organizations unwilling to move from free to paid services, nearly half said they would not because they don’t expect a significant increase in hiring, which could be a reasonable deterrent. Other barriers to moving to a paid model included concerns over poor candidate quality (43%; as noted previously, this is the number-one driver of social and traditional recruiting measures) as well as the unreliability (30%) of social sites and services and lack of integration with existing talent acquisition systems (26%). Of course you will want to make sure any paid service delivers value in return.

Review the tools your organization uses for internal collaboration. For internal collaboration, the majority of organizations are paying for tools, but this is due largely to their existing uses for email, content management, webinars or virtual meetings. Almost half (45%) are not sure if they’d be willing to pay for dedicated collaboration tools, citing concerns over productivity loss, too many unqualified applicants not being filtered, unclear support for talent mobility initiatives and lack of integration between the social media sites and existing talent acquisition or talent management applications. If you share this uncertainty, make an effort to learn about the benefits of tools that help you manage and optimize internal collaborative efforts.



Assess how social media can help you improve talent management. The workforce metric judged most important for talent management activities is employee satisfaction and engagement (chosen by 69%), followed by retention rates (62%) and leadership development (58%). In terms of their talent management goals, organizations focus on information sharing: half of companies said that social media software helps with knowledge sharing, 37 percent cited improved internal collaboration, and 34 percent said social tools help with learning. However, most companies have low usage rates of these social tools; almost half of personnel in HR, training and the lines of business spend only two hours or less utilizing these tools. Examine your organization’s use of the tools you have and how well that use is furthering achievement of talent management goals. The research shows that HR professionals rate their tools less highly than those who work in the areas of training, education, product management and sales. Decide whether user education is necessary as well as whether the capabilities of the tools are adequate. Fewer than one-fourth of organizations currently use these tools for onboarding or training, and fewer than one in six use them for succession planning, performance reviews, workforce planning or mentoring. Proactive organizations should evaluate whether their people, processes and tools can combine to add value to these functions.

Consider changes that will help you find more new hires through social media and reach other goals. The research indicates that most organizations are not yet realizing major recruiting benefits from the use of social media. More than half sourced just one-fourth or fewer eventual hires through this channel in the three months preceding our study; only 8 percent sourced half or more of their new hires this way. The research also finds that half of companies plan to change the way they use social tools in the near future; only 15 percent said they are satisfied with how they use social media sites now. An obvious goal of such change would be to increase the number of new hires, but there can be others: 81 percent said they hope to identify new talent pools, three-fourths seek a competitive advantage, two-thirds will change to improve their recruiting processes, and 58 percent want to improve development of the talent pipeline. All of these motivations are driven by business goals and could have positive impacts on productivity and profitability. We strongly recommend viewing social media for recruiting in this light and taking steps to make it more impactful on the business.

Evaluate more visual tools for collaboration and interviewing. The benchmark research reveals that organizations tend to view established tools as the most important: Microsoft Outlook or Microsoft SharePoint is very important to 47 percent, and company intranets are very important to almost as many. However, next in importance to these conventional tools for sharing information and communicating is the use of webinars – virtual meetings, live communication and education that typically is recorded and available for future playback. More than half of organizations rate webinars as important or very important to their collaboration strategies; only 19 percent do not use webinars for internal talent management purposes. High-quality video capability has increased significantly in recent years, and while only 9 percent rank video usage as very important for talent management, 26 percent rank it as important. These tools share qualities with social media and can bring a fresh look to your efforts in internal collaboration, interviewing candidates live or recording interviews for later assessment.



Evaluate software dedicated to working with social media for recruiting. In terms of software to identify and recruit applicants from social media sources, organizations are making do with what they have. Only 16 percent have a dedicated application for recruiting across job boards and social media; the rest work with their existing applicant tracking software (49%), manual tracking with spreadsheets and documents (26%) or their human resources management system (16%). These tools can provide only limited interaction with social media. Companies that understand the uses and value of social media will consider acquiring systems that can help them gain the competitive edge and other benefits noted above; we advise you to be among them. Keep in mind that people expect social media to be user-friendly and that business people involved in the talent search are seldom technically inclined, and place at the top of the list of capabilities usability – 77 percent said this is a very important consideration. About two-thirds each rated as very important functional capabilities, reliability in performance and scalability and manageability of administration and security. As well, more than half will consider satisfying their cost and benefit requirements as very important. Prioritize these considerations to reflect your needs, and require vendors to demonstrate that they can meet them better than others. The Ventana Research Value Index vendor and product assessment can help you match their capabilities to your requirements.

Be clear about who will fund future investments in social networking technologies. The research shows that the HR and recruiting budgets will be the predominant funding source in 45 percent of organizations’ future purchases of social networking technology. However, a smaller but still substantial group said they don’t know who will be responsible for funding investments; don’t be one of them. You may want to go outside the traditional pattern of IT serving as the source of technology funding; only 15 percent of participants plan to fund such investments from the general IT budget or a line-of-business IT budget. In about one-quarter of organizations, lines of business will share funding costs or those costs will be covered out of the general business fund. In close to half of small organizations, which often lack the extensive budgeting of larger ones, the general business budget will be the source. Whichever the approach that suits your organization, make sure that all involved groups agree on the funding source.

Consider deploying your recruiting processes in the cloud. The research also found indecision regarding how companies wish to deploy social media-enabled software for talent acquisition: The largest portion, 38 percent, expressed no preference. Likely because people associate social media with the Internet, deployment through software as a service (SaaS, 23%) and hosting by the supplier (20%) both outranked the traditional model of on-premises deployment (19%). Cloud deployment can enable the lines of business to minimize implementation and maintenance costs and leave in-house IT free for other responsibilities. We expect this trend to continue and expand, and we advise looking into it for this function.



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