In the world of recruiting, using social media as a recruiting source has become one of the hottest trends lately. Dr. John Sullivan, writing in ERE.Net, calls social media "the most powerful recruiting tool since the telephone."
How viable is social media for volume hiring in the call center? As a Director at FurstPerson, I conducted some high level research to determine candidate views on social media. Our team asked over 350 contact center representative new hires, "What social media do you currently use?" The results showed:
- Facebook: 92%
- Twitter: 34%
- MySpace: 20%
- LinkedIn: 6%
When asked, "What social media have you used in the past?" MySpace jumps from 20% currently using it to 83% who have used it. FurstPerson has also posed these two questions at career fairs over the last 12 months and found similar results.
What about third party support? The learning curve on using social media is steep. Perhaps third party firms that specialize in social media recruitment marketing for hourly workers can provide some insight into these tools. Unfortunately, based on FurstPerson’s research, the majority of these solutions did not separate the social media avenue from current employee referral programs.
These results illustrate some key points:
- Don’t spend time considering MySpace as those users have moved to Facebook as their primary social media outlet. This is consistent with the respective growth of these two social media outlets.
- Although LinkedIn is a positive source for recruiting salary level positions it has not yet taken hold of the contact center representative level. With only 6% of candidates in the survey on LinkedIn, it does not provide a time/cost benefit.
- Based on our survey, call center representatives view social media as a source of entertainment and not a source for professional development. Recruiting via these outlets needs to be carefully managed. Gaining permission to recruit via these sources is challenging, time consuming, and requires a dedicated recruiting team.
- To effectively manage social media outlets to generate any significant hiring scale requires dedicated recruiters focusing on these outlets only. For call centers with significant hiring volume, focusing on other channels like employee referrals may represent a more effective use of time and investment today.
This report was originally generated here on FurstPerson.