According to a recent research study, 50% of the public are using social media to find a job, and 90% of companies are using it to find staff. There are also websites which aim to help job searching and recruitment through the use of social networking.

Abzuna, a job adverting website conducted a nationwide survey which asked over 1000 UK adults and collected data from their job index about how they use social media for finding a job.

Co-Founder of Abzuna, Andrew Hunter,  says “It’s clear that the way in which people look for work has changed dramatically in the last two to three years and it’s hugely exciting to witness how social media has quickly become an integral part of the job hunting process.”

Tony Restell is the director and founder of Social-Hire.com, a website which started in 2011 aiming to help people find a job through social media. “Social media has completely changed the relationship between job seekers and employers, empowering candidates enormously and forcing recruiters to really up their game.”

Social Hire aims to help communication between employee and recruiter and does this for free, “Using existing social media to find a job can be quite costly. A candidate either has to invest a lot of time building up an extensive personal network – or buy subscriptions so as to be able to reach out to new recruiter contacts directly. The Social-Hire model allows you to privately contact every recruiter member, and vice versa. Many candidates want to be actively speaking with potential employers, without this being apparent to anyone else – a concern that’s particularly being aired by users of LinkedIn.”

Tony continues, “Until quite recently, candidates were largely ignored up until the point a company was interested in employing them. Candidates rarely had the chance to speak with someone when deciding whether or not to apply – and often would hear little or nothing back from a company after applying unless they were shortlisted.” [Read more…]