I just read the Jobvite 2010 Social Recruiting report. Of course it's self serving and organizations and individuals that respond to such surveys are more likely to be interested in social recruiting in the first place. The majority of respondents were in the technology/software sector, which again are early adopters of new trends such as social recruiting. Having said that, I didn't see any major surprises in the report.

Here's some quick numbers:

• 36% of respondents plan to spend less on job boards in 2010 than in 2009. Of course this means that 61% plan to spend the same or more.
• 46% plan to spend more on social recruiting.
• Linkedin still rules with 78.3% of companies using it. Facebook was a distant second at 54.6%, and Twitter was 44.8%.
• Only 58.1% of respondents said they'd successfully hired through social networking. This was a bit surprising.

Quality was a key consideration in using social networks, but isn't measured:

• Job boards ranked low in terms of candidate quality.
• Social networks rated higher than job boards.
• Referrals rated highest for quality.
• Despite the respondents rating quality higher for social networks and highest for referrals, quality of hire was not listed as a metric in measuring social recruiting impact. The usual were listed: number of applicants, number of hires, etc.

It would have been very interesting if there was additional data on who had formalized social recruiting policies and guidelines, or whether this was done on an individual recruiter basis. It would also have been good to see what percentage of respondents were federal contractors, and whether they had processes and technology in place to ensure OFCCP compliance in the context of sourcing. And of course I'd love to know what percentage of respondents had rejected applicants based on information found on Facebook.

SAP E-Recruiting Enhancement Pack 5 will allow candidates to store their social identities as part of their profile so that recruiters can link to them. Hopefully we'll see additional functionality in the future, including the pushing of recruiting campaigns through facebook pages, etc.
The support of passive candidates in the system would also be great, along with integration to sourcing tools such as TalentHook or Zoominfo.

As somebody responsible for getting SAP E-Recruiting to work with clients' sourcing strategies, I'd love to hear from people that have had successes in social recruiting. Leave a comment!

Cheers, Mark