Does Social Network Recruiting Yield Results?

Even in a time of macroeconomic uncertainty, growing companies are hiring. The best and brightest are always in high demand. Recruiting is difficult, and expensive yet it’s one of the most important things in any organization. A company is only made up of the people who are recruited into it, and the company culture is defined by those people (not by mission statements and motivational posters on the wall).

We provide you with an interesting case study, courtesy of our friends at Bazaarvoice. They recently executed on a social networking recruiting campaign, and a more traditional newspaper PR campaign. Then they compared the results, and shared them with us.

On September 8th at 10am, the company coordinated all their employees to send out “we’re hiring” messages to all their friends in their social networks. The timing aspect of the blast is interesting. For people who have multiple contacts at Bazaarvoice, they may receive the messaging multiple times, which would further bolster the recruiting messages. As people start spreading the word, it is potentially getting spread to people who also were aware of the recruiting drive and the word of mouth multiplies. (e.g. “Did you hear Bazaarvoice is hiring? — Yeah, I heard about that.”)

To give you some hard numbers, the timed social network campaign increased traffic to the jobs page 117% over the previous week. There was a 237% increase in job referrals, and a 33% increase in applications. Not bad considering that it was pretty much free just to coordinate the timing of the social network recruiting campaign.

Looking at the chart, the first spike is the social networking campaign. The second spike is activity from an article in The Statesman. The social networking yielded more views and slightly more referrals, and the Statesman article yielded fewer visits but more applicants. Food for thought when you’re trying to bootstrap your next recruiting campaign.

Posted by Austin Startup http://www.austinstartup.com To read more posts click here.