- Recruiters reliance on traditional print media is falling
- Many IT leaders rely on external recruitment consultancies or referral schemes
- Social media is yet to achieve its potential as a recruitment tool
The number of IT jobs being advertised in print media is grinding to a halt, with overall adverts decreasing by as much as 92%*. According to Modis International [“Modis”], a global leader in IT recruitment, just 1 in 10 senior IT decision makers used the medium to attract new staff in the last 12 months.
In addition to this decline in print media job ads, a similarly small number, (9 per cent) said they used traditional job boards to attract new applicants. This is a huge reduction from last year, when almost a third said they were using this outlet as a means of recruiting. Job boards were listed as the 4th most popular method of recruiting in the last 12 months.
Specialist IT recruitment consultancies remain the most popular (54 per cent) recruitment tool, with referral schemes coming in some way behind, used by 13 per cent of IT leaders. Company websites made up the final segment of the top three, with seven percent of senior IT decision makers relying on this medium for advertising vacancies.
With the decline of print media and the tightening of budgets, it would seem that social media should be well placed to offer an alternative hunting-ground for IT recruiters – however, this has not materialised.
Social media is the second least popular recruitment tool, with only 5 per cent stating that it was their preferred method. The ambivalence towards social media is at odds with the enthusiasm IT leaders had expressed previously: when surveyed in 2009/10, a little under half (41 per cent) of IT leaders said they were keen to use sites such as Linkedin, Twitter and Facebook for recruitment, which makes these figures somewhat unexpected.
Commenting on the research, Jim Albert, Managing Director, Modis International, said:
“Given that IT recruitment and social media would seem destined to be close allies, the results of this survey are certainly surprising. It should be remembered that social media is best used as part of a wider, multi-media recruitment drive, and this could account for the low figure that has emerged from our research.
“Previous polling showed that IT leaders had a growing appetite for using this medium, so there is still a gap between interest and actual usage. For many, I think this is a question of how best to use social media. Time constraints can often be a factor, and for this reason IT decision makers should look to share social media activity with HR teams. Updating a status on Linkedin or Twitter to say that a given organisation is hiring can often be a simple, cost effective and time-efficient way of driving social media traffic to a recruitment platform.”
*Additional Source: Business Insider - http://www.businessinsider.com/how-the-newspaper-business-shrank-92-in-a-decade-2011-3
