1. Internet and recruitment

person writing on white paper
Foto von William Iven

It took radio 38 years to reach 50 million listeners, it took television 13 years to reach 50 million viewers … but the internet acquired 50 million users in only 4 years. 58% of the entire European population is now online, and this number is still rising. Between 2000 and 2011, the number of internet users in Europe rose to 476 million – that’s an increase of a staggering 353%. (source: Internet World Stats March 2011).

The evolution of the internet has completely changed the way people search for information, and it has clearly had an impact on the way they look for jobs. While newspapers and personal networks were the main source of information for job seekers till around 1990, the online world has quickly taken the lead in the 21st century.

A 2010 StepStone survey on search behaviour confirms that European job seekers looking for a new professional challenge mainly use the internet: close to 95% use online media. Once job seekers are online, job boards (93% of searches) are well in the lead. Other approaches include search engines (72%) and social media (56%).

When asked to rank recruitment channels, organisations too put job boards first: they offer best value for money by reaching the widest number of high quality candidates.

2. Social media and recruitment

While the internet used to be mainly a place to find information published by companies and organizations, individuals have now started having their say and interacting more and more through social media. Facebook needed only three years to reach its first 50 million users, and the 500 million users in July 2010 had grown to 750 million users a year later.

Social media have become a way of living and of communicating. People using social media are likely to be looking for information about areas that interest them and interacting with friends, not looking for product information. Instead of being hidden from view in their houses or offices, or even behind a newspaper, people are now taking part in daily life more visibly. This is an excellent opportunity for recruiters who want to get in touch with prospective employees.

Professional networks such as LinkedIn are especially popular with recruiters, because they offer so much information about prospective employees. But can a well-stocked database of CVs that costs almost nothing really deliver? This sounds almost too good to be true, so last year StepStone decided to look into the real ROI for recruiting via social media.

Our 2010 survey showed that 72% of Europeans have one or more social media accounts … but only 28% of job-seekers are actually using social media to help them find work. LinkedIn is generally the most popular social network for job-seeking, though in Germany and Austria more people use Xing.

Nearly half of all European companies already use social media, with more companies adopting this tactic every day. More than three quarters of these companies use social media for recruiting new hires, and the other activities in the top five are:

  • running background checks of new employees
  • presenting the company profile
  • communicating with candidates
  • posting job opportunities
After six successful publications, Aktor Interactive - specialised in international online advertising – presents their 7th edition of the “International Market Report on European Job Boards”. It aims to facilitate the work of international staff managers and all those involved in the recruitment process.

This market analysis gathers important data and statistics about 50 European job boards and enables readers to find information on the most widely used generalist commercial job sites in all the 27 EU member States as well as Switzerland and Norway.

It contains a detailed profile for each job board including key information on their media data, the composition of their CV databases, their public list prices, their intended marketing activities for 2010/2011, the latest innovation of the site, recommendation made by Aktor Interactive, designed to help recruiters identify the site most suited to their particular need.

In the editorial section, Aktor presents the 5 biggest international e-recruitment networks with particular focus on The Network and Monster Worldwide.

Guest authors point out major developments that have taken place in the wider international job board market over the last year:

  • Employer Brand as a strategic weapon in the war for talent
  • A helicopter view of the UK job board market
  • Trends in international online recruitment (such as Social Media, company videos, mobile phones …)

It may not cost much money to run recruitment through social media, but it does require a significant investment of time. Taking all the costs and use of resources into account, we found that the ROI of social media is still on the low side. And half the companies we surveyed have not found even one suitable candidate this way.

All in all, though, recruiting via social media is here to stay: it’s a trend worth following, trying out and getting acquainted with. Both recruiting companies and job seekers find that social media are a useful extra channel, an addition to existing channels in the job market.

Companies looking for personnel still find job boards the most effective way of recruiting. Recruitment agencies, CV databases (internal and external) and print advertising complete the top five; for the time being, social media is still behind the front runners.

3. Video use for recruitment

It has never been easier to publish corporate video using social media. It costs less and less, both in time and in money, to prepare audiovisual content for the internet. With over a billion Youtube views per day worldwide, a company video has become a very popular and affordable vehicle to get your message across.

Video conveys a lot of information in very little time. People visiting your site can learn more about your company from watching a three-minute video than from reading all the pages in the career section of your website.

Give potential employees a sneak peek into what your company does and how it operates, and a positive picture of how enthusiastic your employees are – offering a recruitment video is like letting people take a test-drive in a car, to find out whether it will suit them.

Show what you are and what you have to offer: a corporate video with a clear message is an ideal way of expressing your company’s personality. Highlight your products and services, show the people working there, share the working atmosphere. But always make sure your video stays true to your real corporate culture.

Once your recruitment video is ready, there are a lot of channels available for distributing it. You can post a link to the new video on social media sites, for example, and use the video to bring your company website to life…

[Written by Dewi Wibowo, Marketing Programs Manager StepStone]

Read on in Aktor Interactive’s “International Market Report on European Job Sites 2011/2012”,

available on October 17th.

Premium members of HRM.de can purchase the report at half the price.

For more information, please contact: studie@aktor-interactive.de, +33 (0) 437 60 25 59