In the lovely article titled ‘UK tech companies fall behind US in social recruiting – survey’
Silicon Republic states:
US companies are ahead of their UK counterparts when it comes to using the web and social media to recruit new employees, new research from recruitment software provider Zartis suggests.
LinkedIn is the most popular social media network for recruitment, with one-quarter of US companies directly advertising job vacancies on the site, compared to 14pc of UK companies doing the same.
So what a Silicon Republic reader is let to believe is? Yes, you have guessed it right, and the title of the article have helped you: UK tech companies fall behind US in social recruiting.
The only fact in the whole article to back it up is that there is more top US companies advertising jobs on LinkedIn than in UK. So the conclusion that the UK companies fall behind US ones is based on the number of jobs advertised on LinkedIn.
The reason this is so sad is that it shows absolute lack of understanding what online recruitment on the social networks actually is from the author of the article from SiliconRepublic. Any recruiter that uses LinkedIn knows well that even the city with the largest number of recruiters in the World on LinkedIn is – guess what? London! The number of social recruitment conferences in London is as well greater (per capita) than in any other city in the world!
The truth is that the UK, as well as majority of the European recruiters know well that advertising jobs is the last thing to do on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a ‘Social Network’ not a ‘Jobs Board’. Making a statement that the UK recruiters are ‘falling behind’ based on the number of jobs posted is just very, very wrong.
The best will be in about a year’s time when the ‘Update’ to this statistics gets published with the update: ‘UK recruiters are catching up with the US’. That will be based on the increase of the number of jobs published on LinkedIn in UK next year. I am guessing SiliconRepublic will not see any connection on the LinkedIn sales staff numbers in UK in the increase of the number of jobs posted next year.
2 replies on “Rock bottom quality journalism from Silicon Republic”
“The only fact in the whole article to back it up is that there is more top US companies advertising jobs on LinkedIn than in UK”
So the stats about Twitter and Facebook you have conveniently left out from the article don’t count then? Linking back to the article might allow people to see that.
Lazy blogging and a contorted conclusion based on misinformation. Well done
@Meh Thanks for your comment!
You might call it lazy blogging. I would say, in depth knowledge of the online recruitment industry. Browse the older articles for reviews and tips on how to (or not to) use each of those tools in recruitment.
Facebook recruitment is still in the diapers stage. Twitter recruitment – is almost non-existent.
So what is most important is that the author of the Silicon Republic article unfortunately dos not understand that activity of recruiting on LinkedIn cannot be measured by the number of the jobs posted. It just shows complete lack of understanding of the usage of social media in recruitment. In fact, LinkedIn could well server recruiters (at it does most of them anyway) WITHOUT any job posting. Therefore the article that concludes the UK recruiters are falling behind the US because they do not post jobs on LinkedIn is not really Pulitzer prize material.