Social media is becoming a focal point for job seekers and recruiters, either in terms of advertising of positions, or as a supplement more established recruitment techniques like the use of job boards. A number of startups are launching tools designed to work with social media to help employers find job candidates and job candidates find jobs.
In the US, an estimated $140 billion or more is spent by corporations on employment recruiting. Job seekers spend money trying to find new jobs as well. Social media has shown ideas among new players about disrupting the business of connecting job seekers with jobs. In the US every year – virtually regardless of the economic climate – some 40 million people change jobs. Tools to make these new matches more efficient could be very valuable to both employers and job candidates.
The Impact of Social Media
Social media engages over one billion people who use these sites for all various manners of sharing, including sharing of personal information, trends, and jobs. It makes sense that if someone knows of a job opening that her friends might be interested in, she may share the job ad on Facebook.
Recruiters and employers have taken notice and now strive to make job advertisements easily shareable to extend their reach. In fact, the Society for Human Resource Management says that 77% of its members use social networking sites to locate passive job candidates, to look for active job candidates, and post information about their organizations to generate and sustain interest.
What Corporations Hope to Get from Social Networks
Corporations can see the value of social media outlets for extending their reach and improving return on investment for their recruiting efforts. Spotting a prime passive job candidate on a social network and gradually building a connection can be a smart long term investment, should a suitable position become open. The new startups that are capitalizing on this interest in social media on the part of employers and job seekers are busy developing different types of social tools, from big data mining to helping individuals build their own professional referral networks.
How Online Publishers Can Benefit from These New Tools
Online publishers, including trade publication websites and news websites often turn to custom job boards as part of a recruitment advertising section of their website that helps build traffic, engage audiences, and monetize the site. Employers pay to list on these job boards, and visitors to the site use the job boards to further their careers. Many online publishers and digital media companies are now intrigued by new social media recruiting tools and want to integrate them into their job board platforms to meet employer demands for job board features that give them an edge in finding suitable job candidates.
Recruitment Advertising Solutions Are Answering This Need
RealMatch is a leader in providing recruitment advertising solutions for digital publishers. To maintain its position on the leading edge of recruitment advertising technology and more readily meet customer needs, it has introduced Social Boost. Social Boost was designed to give employer job postings additional exposure on social media platforms, helping them extend their reach to new audiences and find job candidates they may have missed before.
What Social Boost Does
Designed to seamlessly integrate social media recruiting with traditional job board recruitment advertising, Social Boost offers special posting optimization, so that employer ads are distributed as effectively as possible on social media platforms. With Social Boost, employer ads gain distribution over 11,000 Twitter job channels as well as distribution in targeted news feed ads on Facebook. Ads are also distributed on Facebook Marketplace.
The integration of social media into so many aspects of personal and professional life has made for an environment that is ripe for innovation. Like many hot startup niches, some of these new tools will survive and thrive, while others will fade into oblivion. In the space where social media intersects with employment recruiting, RealMatch has created Social Boost to allow employers to easily take advantage of the opportunities inherent in social media recruiting, to help publishers to further build traffic and revenue, and to give job seekers more paths leading to the jobs they want.