LinkedIn certainly doesn’t represent everyone – only the people with a LinkedIn profile. Having said that, I am sure that the true # of “recruiters” out there far exceeds even the large number I came up with from LinkedIn. So I would have to assume the BLS’s lower figure it simply a result of an estimate, a limitation in their ability toactually get data from every company in the entire United States, or the result of focusing solely on the “recruiter” title and not other titles that are responsible for recruiting as well.

When people want me to talk about using technology for talent identification, their smiles (and interest) seem to disappear when I start talking excitedly about mining internal candidate databases (ATS, CRM, etc.). The effective use of databases (job boards and internal) isn’t as sexy as Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook.

I agree 100% that social media does not account for enough hires to justify the “feverish level of activity by people posting blog articles, training or recruiters actually using them,” as you so aptly put it. I write articles about how to use Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to find people – but I also write about “traditional” sourcing methods and what I think has the highest talent identification ROI. However, the traffic figures show me quite clearly which posts are the most popular, and it’s the social media stuff – not the traditional stuff.

Can you use social media to find great candidates? Sure! But that’s not the point. The return on time invested is much lower than more “traditional” methods of talent identification, as every poll and report shows. It seems like a no-brainer to me to spend the most time on what has the highest ROI and the least time on what has the lowest ROI.

One of the analogies I use to make my point is that investing heavily in Twitter (or similar) to find candidates is like walking into a casino and purposefully searching for the game that has the lowest odds of winning.

When recruiting leaders are spending time worrying about whether or not they should allow their sourcers and recruiters to access Facebook during business hours from corporate systems, they should really be worrying about whether or not their sourcers and recruiters are making the best use of their ATS/CRM for the many reasons I’ve written about in several posts. Even more effective use of job board resume databases has a much higher ROI than social media, although no one really seems to want to hear that, as I’m constantly told that the job boards all have “bad candidates.”

I agree with your assessment of basic human nature – the “familiar” (recruiting and sourcing basics) quickly becomes boring and people are easily drawn to the next new “shiny object.” That’s unfortunate, because I’d argue that at least 80% of the results are produced by consistent and flawless execution of the “basics.” To spend a disproportionate amount of time on the things that produce 20% or less of the results is folly.

I will give one more fact that people must consider given I too have not jumped on the LI bandwagon, and the same reason I have not jumped on twitter or other 2.0 sources as the silver bullet to our candidate identification strategies.

The issue is not that these sources do not potential work, they do. The challenge is that they do not produce enough hires to justify the feverish level of activity by people posting blog articles, training or recruiters actually using them.

[Sidebar] Yes we could get into a side debate about the accuracy of source of hire data, but let’s take that off the table for the moment based off some facts that I can point to for the last few years when I have ensured that the source of hire data I have been tracking for companies has been cleaned up. We now have the ability to automatically complete the source of application, as part of the application process where it takes it out of the hands of the candidate worrying about the bazillion choices they are traditionally faced with when applying to a job. I even went so far with a passive sourcing team carefully and manually enter where they original found the name in the first place as a double check and balance.

If you carefully track source of visitor/application/candidate workflow/hire data you will find that the usual suspects are still the main source of hire (80% from these channels) for lots of companies
- Careersweb site (could be forwarding traffic from organic search or referring sites from postings)
- Job Boards
- Employee Referrals (should be most)
- 3rd party agencies (should be least)

LI which I have been tracking even from teams that focus on pure sourcing (vs. full lifecycle recruiting), over the last 5 years, the % of hires originating from this source is less than 5% of total hires. My point is not that this 5% is not important or that this might one day to be much more, but rather back to my initial point that the energy and effort that people invest in these bright and shiny objects IMHO do not produce the appropriate ROI.

Yes one key hire that you found on LI could justify the use of the tool, but you have your head in the sand as a leader, recruiter or sourcer if you are spending too much time on thinking that LI and other 2.0 tools are going to solve the bulk of your openings………..they simply are not going to do that.

Personally (not including you Glen), I would like to see more discussions from people on how they increased their employee referrals by 10% or how they increased employer brand that it increased traffic to their careers pages by 100%. The reason we do not see these things discussed so much is back to a fundamental flaw with human nature………..We don’t have the appetite to stick with the core things that work and continue to refine/tweak/adjust and improve as it is not that cool or fun…………..Its hard bloody work.

I agree that ranking and labeling candidates is highly subjective, but I would not go so far as to stereotype all of Kforce (or any company for that matter) with regard to the quality of candidates recruited. One could just as easily argue that any particular recruiter at any firm – large or small – could have higher candidate quality standards than a highly niched firm (e.g., niched firm recruiter may think they have an “A” candidate, yet a recruiter from another firm may judge them to be a “C” candidate).

I think it really comes down to the individual recruiter level, regardless of firm, and you can’t compare apples to apples, candidate to candidate, unless you and another recruiter had evaluated exactly the same candidate and labeled them – then compared notes.

In the end, debating candidate quality is moot unless you can speak objectively about the exact same candidates. Saying 1 firm recruits what it thinks are “A” candidates that someone from another firm would consider to be “C” players is 100% conjecture and is based solely on opinion, sans fact.

The only relatively neutral (unbaised by the recruiter’s personal opinion) and objective measure of candidate quality is the client’s assessment of candidates. The client/manager is the ultimate judge of candidate quality. When I consistently achieve 1 candidate submitted/1 hire – in competitive scenarios (other recruiters are submitting candidates as well) – I can feel pretty confident my “A” is also my client’s definition of “A”. I could care less how recruiters at other firms rate their candidates.

Also, I ran this search on LinkedIn, which targets the words HR or “Human Resources” in the U.S.: country:”united states” ctitle:”HR OR human resources” and I got 104,378 results, which is roughly only 10% of my 1.038 M figure. Additionally, adding HR specifically only adds 6,550 more to the total results (97,828 say human resources, and 6550 say HR).

You’re right – having around 1M recruiting types on LinkedIn in the U.S. can appear to make LinkedIn heavuly tapped, and I agree that many are not fully leveraging it. However, the large number of recruiters on LinkedIn at least highlights that LinkedIn is not a secret competitive advantage for anyone who’s trying to do some recruiting. The “secret” is out, in a BIG way.

I did want to mention that by including “human resources” in the search string for recruiters the number of individuals actually involved in the recruiting process may be a bit lower since many people with “human resources” in their job title are not directly involved in recruiting. With that said, the non-inclusion of the term “HR” excludes about 113,000 from your search, so maybe they cancel each other out in the final results. Any thoughts? Either way, your point is well taken.

I do think what you say in your conclusion is very important. There are many recruiters – especially those working in corporate settings or those not responsible for sourcing – who are on LinkedIn but do not use it for recruiting. Some recruiters (who are less savvy LinkedIn users) see the site as a way to connect to other recruiters but do not utilize it as a candidate database. For this reason, I think there are fewer recruiters leveraging LinkedIn effectively making it less tapped into then it may appear.