Are all the candidates on Facebook?
Tuesday, February 3, 2009 at 12:28PM
Steve in Recruiting

If 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?

 

Article originally appeared on Steve's HR Technology (http://steveboese.squarespace.com/).
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