Facebook and LinkedIn for recruiters

In the past three months, two of my colleagues have left the company for jobs found through LinkedIn. In both cases, neither of them were actively looking for jobs and they were simply recruited through their profiles. One went to Paypal and the other went to Google. I had been skeptical about the effectiveness of social media sites to actually find jobs but I have since been proven wrong.

In a recent article, Mashable proposes that while employers use LinkedIn for recruiting executive positions, they prefer finding recent graduates via Facebook rather than LinkedIn. This came as a surprise to me as Facebook seems like a farther stretch for recruiting purposes. According to online recruiting research lab Potentialpark, more than one-third of the top 100 employers in Europe have a Facebook Page for recruitment purposes. Among other things, they find Facebook more engaging, scalable, and effective in branding.

Given that companies want to find the best talent it is not surprising that they are active in the social media space. It reminds us once again to be mindful of our social media activity as it can be both helpful and hurtful to our job opportunities.

Go here for the full article: http://mashable.com/2011/10/09/recruiters-prefer-facebook/