The Crescent Solutions team thought we’d share insights into recruitment from Irish Internet recruitment trainer Social Talent, which has announced its “10 Predictions for Recruitment & Staffing in 2012.”
Social Recruiting finally went mainstream in 2011 with corporate and agency recruiters embracing LinkedIn and Internet sourcing as a required skill for the modern recruiter, shifting away from job-board advertising to digital headhunting. Here are Social Talent’s Top 10 predictions for 2012:
1. LinkedIn will reach 300 million users by the end of 2012.
As of December 27, 2011, LinkedIn had more than 146 million members, up from the 100 million milestone that the company announced early in 2011. We predict that growth will continue to gain pace throughout 2012 as most developed or developing markets hit membership levels equivalent to 30-40 percent of their working population.
2. Facebook’s decline in usage will continue throughout 2012 as Facebook Apathy takes a firm hold.
Facebook has had a roller-coaster year. The first half of 2011 saw Facebook’s total number of users surge to over 800 million with the time on site and average number of page-views growing to dizzying heights. The second half of the year saw most of those latter gains lost as the average amount of time that each user spent on Facebook dropped off considerably, the largest such decline in the social network’s history.
3. Video Assessment will go mainstream for Corporate Recruiters.
Video interviewing, video CVs and video assessment have been around for years. Many professionals may have written off the technology as “unnecessary” for the modern HR or recruitment department, but we predict that 2012 will change perceptions of video technology in the recruitment mix. Faster Internet speeds and an explosion in smart phone usage on fast, wireless networks has put a video camera in the pocket of nearly every potential jobseeker, demolishing many of the previous barriers to video usage in the industry.
4. Twitter will explode as a Recruitment Communication Tool.
Twitter’s power to both interrupt and inform us continued apace in 2011 with steady growth in the network’s user base and time on site. TV networks now display the hashtags of their leading shows on-screen and decide on whether to renew new programs based on Twitter chatter and mentions. In the world of recruitment, most corporate and agency recruiters have finally “got it” and started using Twitter during 2011.
5. Social Media Litigation will become the single largest headache for HR departments.
Most social media experts tell us that we need to be “true” or “honest” on social networks, ensuring that we share at least some of our personal side as we blog, tweet or post on social media sites on behalf of our employers. This is generally good advice but when building contacts is part of your job, aka sales or recruitment, the question of who owns those contacts is going to become an even hotter issue.
6. Mobile will dominate the total spend in recruitment websites/ career portals.
Have you launched a mobile recruitment app yet? Is your careers page or agency website optimized for mobile? My answer to this question used to be “when the mobile traffic to my site gets to a serious enough level, I’ll fix it”. In early 2011, the company website received an average of 5.1 percent of its visitors from mobile devices (topped by iOS at 85 percent of all mobile visits. By year’s end it was receiving 8.5 percent of total visits from mobile devices (iOS devices still top the list but have fallen to 73 percent of all mobile visits).
7. LinkedIn will move aggressively into the HR software space.
Let’s face it—LinkedIn’s paying customers are nearly all recruiters. I am sure there are many non-recruiters who throw $20 a month at them, but the serious customers are corporate recruiting departments. LinkedIn barely offer any products not aimed at recruiters.
8. Free or Freemium will become the new ATS pricing model.
The price of applicant tracking software (ATS), aka recruitment management software, has crashed in the last few years. This has largely been driven by the introduction of SaaS as the dominant hosting platform among the main players, but differentiation has become less about price these days as average per-user licenses have hit the $1k mark and is now more about quality of implementation, support and socially integrated features.
9. Third-party Recruitment Platforms will emerge as the New Job Boards.
Job Boards are broken, and they have been so for some time. But they are not dead—they just haven’t been fixed yet. From a job-seekers point of view, the act of searching for a job in one place and then being able to apply for it in that same place is simple and for years it worked really well. But the combination of the Great Recession and changing attitudes to Web communication, aka Social Media, have meant that this 15-year-old system needs a re-haul. At the same time, there have been several companies trying to “crack” Facebook for job seekers, noticeably BranchOut and BeKnown (Monster.com’s property). But we’re still not sure that job seekers are comfortable mixing their personal lives with their professional lives.
10. We will share an increasing amount of content and learning via video.
In November 2011, U.S. Internet users watched 21.1 hours of video on the Web, an increase of 35 percent on the previous year and 22 percent alone over the last half of 2011. It is hard to deny that we are all watching an increasing amount of video over the Internet. Facebook marketers and SEO experts will tell you that video is more powerful as a method of social engagement than text and will massively increase the chance of your website/ career site being found online.
