Employers slow to take advantage of Web 2.0 opportunities when attracting and retaining staff

Organisations are failing to boost the attraction and retention of key talent through the benefits of Web 2.0, according to this yearís new social networking findings in the CIPD 2008 Recruitment, Retention and Turnover survey of 779 respondent organisations.

An overwhelming majority (80%) of organisations do not currently use Web 2.0 online methods to attract or recruit employees with only 8% planning to start using the technology in the next year.

Yet, of the 100 CIPD respondent members, over half (56%) believe that social networking sites are useful for engaging potential job seekers and welcome its ability to shed light on how they are perceived in the marketplace (52%). The majority (62%) are concerned, however, that damaging comments about their organisation might be posted.

Encouragingly, the majority of organisations that do use social networking (85%) do not use it as a tool to vet candidates during the recruitment process.

Deborah Fernon, Organisation and Resourcing Adviser, CIPD says: ìOrganisations should be careful when using these technologies to vet candidates. In the quest to find the right person for a job, social networking sites could be at best irrelevant and at worst misleading. Good practice requires that every candidate is treated equally, which means all candidates would have to have similar profiles before information is used, and this poses challenges as not everyone has a social networking profile.

ìThrough the richness of multimedia and connectivity, web 2.0 technology provides an opportunity to bring the employer brand to life and create experiences online that allow potential employees to experience what it is like to work within the organisation. Using technology like Facebook or Second Life, an employer brand can reach global effective.î

Of the 54 respondent organisations that use social networking sites to attract or recruit employees, the favoured sites include LinkedIn (62%), Facebook (58%) and MySpace (11%).