According to a brand new study by Career Builder, one-quarter of companies leverage social media and social networking to recruit and research potential staff. Twenty-nine percent of companies with 500 or fewer staff are making use of social media in some way. And much more than half of leisure and hospitality organizations use social networking to help market their companies.
As businesses emerge from one of the steepest economic downturns in history, they understand the significant reach and importance of utilizing social media to market and rebuild their organizations. A new CareerBuilder survey reports that 35 percent of employers use social networking to market their organization. One-quarter (25 percent) of these employers mentioned that they are utilizing social media to connect with clients and discover new business, whilst others are using it to recruit and study potential staff (21 %), or strengthen their employment brands (13 %). The survey was conducted among much more than 2,500 employers between May 18 and June three, 2010.
Businesses of all sizes and industries report utilizing social media to market their companies. Twenty-nine % of organizations with 500 or fewer employees said they do so, followed by 38 % of companies with 501 to 1,000 employees and 44 percent of businesses with more than 1,000 workers. Comparing industries, leisure and hospitality topped those surveyed with 57 % saying the use social media to promote their company, followed by IT, (48 percent), retail (43 percent) and sales (41 %).
When it comes to managing social media strategy, 43 percent of employers report that their marketing department handles social networking outreach, followed by public relations (26 %) and human resources (19 %). One-quarter (25 percent) of employers have 1-3 people communicating on behalf of their organization, while 7 percent report that 4-5 individuals handle the work. Eleven % said that more than six individuals communicate for their organization via social networking. Fifty-seven % mentioned they didn't know.
Workers report that they are turning to social networking sites for more than connecting with friends. They're also utilizing social media to study companies and jobs. Workers who come across organization pages on social networking websites shared what they would most like to see, including:
-- Job listings - 35 %
-- Q&A or fast facts about the organization - 26 %
-- Information about career paths within the organization - 23 %
-- Evidence that working at the company is fun - 16 %
-- Employee testimonials - 16 percent
-- Pictures of company events - 12 percent
-- Video of new products/services - 10 percent
-- Company awards - 9 %
-- Study or studies that the organization has conducted - 9 %
-- Videos of a day on the job - 8 percent
On the flip side, workers also shared the biggest turnoffs when encountering a company via social media, including the company's communication reading like an ad (38 percent), failure to reply to questions (30 %), failure to regularly post information (22 percent) and removing or filtering public comments (22 %).
Survey Methodology
This survey was conducted online within the U.S. by Harris Interactive© on behalf of CareerBuilder.com among 2,534 U.S. hiring managers and 4,498 U.S. workers (employed full-time; not self-employed; non government); ages 18 and over between Might 18 and June 3, 2010 (percentages for some questions are based on a subset of U.S. employers and/or staff, based on their responses to certain questions). With a pure probability sample of 2,534 and 4,498 1 could say with a 95 % probability that the overall results have a sampling error of +/- 1.95 and +/-1.46 percentage points, respectively. Sampling error for data from sub-samples is higher and varies.
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