Team social networks against Headhunter.ru - comparative test

How to search for staff in social networks?

Use social networks to search for staff can be different.

You can search for online accounts of potential candidates directly or go to them through contact lists and friends, you can send an advertisement for hiring to those you may be interested in, and those who can recommend their colleagues or acquaintances, you can send job descriptions with requests for repost.

You can post job ads in groups that are specifically created for job posting and in communities that bring together professionals.
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If you have many contacts / friends, you can share ads with them for hire.

How to find out whether the search for personnel in social networks is effective.
Everything is relative.

For comparison, you need to place a real ad on the working site and at the same time start searching for personnel in social networks.

After some time, evaluate the effectiveness of both search methods.

So I did.

Benchmarking - Headhunter vs Team Social Networks

Since the real announcement about the hiring of a personnel director was used as a “test job”, I managed to get by with minimal effort to post a job on social networks.

Participation in professional HR-communities, as well as in special groups in which vacancies are published, made it possible not to waste time searching for groups and joining them to post vacancies.

Immediately I will note an important point - we are talking only about publishing an advertisement for hiring in social networks and distributing it in your personal network of contacts / friends.

I did not search for accounts and send out personal messages and requests for repost — this is serious and time-consuming work, the implementation of which in the framework of this project was inappropriate.

As for the publication of an advertisement for hiring on a working site, I used the standard ad on hh.ru worth 700 rubles.

What networks were used to search for staff

First of all, Facebook and Linkedin.

Why they? In my opinion, the target audience to which my ad is addressed is most widely represented on these networks.

The total number of participants in Facebook groups in which the vacancy was placed - 15-20 thousand people, 25-35 thousand - Linkedin. The total number of personal contacts that could see a job is 3,500 on Facebook and 10,000 on Linkedin.

In both networks, I placed an advertisement for hiring on my own page, HR-PRACTICE pages, communities of the same name, as well as in professional groups and special groups for posting vacancies.

For the purity of the experiment, I used Vkontakte and Odnoklassniki, but they limited myself to publishing an advertisement about hiring only on my pages and in professional groups.

Despite the impressive number of participants of the groups on the topics “Jobs, vacancies” of Vkontakte and Odnoklassniki, I didn’t risk placing the “HR Director” vacancy in them - the neighborhood with the vacancies of salesmen and sales managers seemed to me inappropriate.

Summarizing

The team of social networks shamefully lost to the traditional Headhunter.

As responses to the e-mail address indicated in the announcement on social networks, only 34 resumes were received, while Headhunter “shot” 548 of them.

The actual performance of social networks turned out to be zero, which was understandable given the fact that Headhunter’s efficiency ratio in this project was about 3%.

Hypotheses

I don’t suggest that anyone consider the result obtained by me in one comparative test a regularity.

Many experts use social networks to search for employees, perhaps someone has other results.

Some colleagues from the IT-sphere consider social networks to be a much more effective tool than working sites, although, taking into account the fact that search is not limited only to the publication of a vacancy.

I try to reflect on why my experience was so unfortunate.

The first thing that comes to mind is the association with the fence on which ads are posted.

Headhunter's fence is always in the same place, everyone knows that it is hanging on it, go to it with a specific purpose and can find the right ad using the search form.

If you posted an ad on hh.ru, then nobody will break it for a month - everyone will read it.

As for social networks with their constantly scrolling tape from a variety of content, then you can see an ad on this fence rather by chance than purposefully.

The search engine, unlike hh.ru, does not equip this fence, moreover, it does not actually stand still, but constantly moves.

And this fence itself decides to whom and what ads to show - I mean content ranking algorithms in social networks.

Not all visitors to social networks are looking for work. This explains why even a large audience does not make the publication of the announcement effective.

Conclusion

I hope my experience will be useful to you.

If you know the secret of how to use social networks more effectively - share them in the comments to this material.

I wish you success and good luck in finding staff.