Are all the candidates on Facebook?
SteveIf you are a corporate recruiter or hiring manager are you using Facebook at all in your recruiting strategy?
Because based on my very unscientific and limited data set, it appears like pretty much everyone you might be targeting is either already on Facebook, or will be soon.
This is a chart showing the number of registered Facebook users from my high school, the incredibly typical, average, run-of-the-mill public school, John F. Kennedy Memorial High School in Iselin, NJ USA. The Jul-08 line shows the data as of the first time I prepared the chart, and the Feb-09 line shows the data as of today.
In just about 7 months, Facebook use by my high school cohort for the graduation years I selected (a total of 12 graduating classes), has increased from 229 to 1,068. That is a 366% growth rate from just my high school in the last 7 months! Is there anyone not on Facebook these days?
In the last couple of years more and more organizations have embraced Facebook as a platform for recruiting, usually from the 'branding' and communication perspective. If the adoption trends displayed by the good folks from my high school are at all indicative of larger trends in the US, expect to see more and more organizations dive in to the Facebook pool.
So to ask the question again:
Are all the candidates on Facebook?
Reader Comments (2)
No, not all candidates are on Facebook. Not yet at least. I notice that I can find more candidates on LinkedIn than on Facebook and that there is not always a cross over.
Kaye - thanks for your comment and observations. I am not in recruiting, so I perhaps should have framed the question more like 'Are all the folks aged 20-50 on Facebook?'. I honestly was astonished in the growth rate of my little sample from my High School. The first time I prepared the chart and discussed it with my class, the context was 'If you are targeting 25 year olds, you may want to consider a recruiting presence on Facebook'. Tonight when I discussed the chart, the context had shifted to be more like 'If you are recruiting anyone, you may want to consider a recruiting presence on Facebook'. Will these growth rates continue? Who knows, but you would be foolish to ignore them, and miss out on this potential candidate pool. Thanks again, Steve