I’m amazed at how quickly 2015 vanished, it was a very eventful year which saw s1jobs enjoy a stellar period of growth, and the success story continues! I’m delighted to tell you that we have had a fantastic start to the New Year already. In January we saw a record number of 748,371 unique job seekers visit s1jobs, that’s a notable 8% increase on our previous record in January 2013.
Not only that, we are now exceeding over 200,000 applications every month. Its great news for Scottish jobs and job seekers alike to see such volume. We expected the beginning of the New Year to be busy with job seekers as normal, but we’ve been blown away with the high volume of activity. We also continue to receive much more Scottish traffic than any other job board, almost 600,000 visits more than our closest competitor. But the stand out fact for me is, we have more direct employer vacancies in Scotland than any other job board.
The rise of Social Media has been extraordinary, we access the internet 24/7/365 on a variety of platforms with Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn becoming an integral part of everyday life. Here at s1jobs, we recognised the potential social media offered to the recruitment process, and we are now reaping the benefits. Our social networks are also seeing significant increases, Facebook likes are up 85% year on year, as are Twitter up 62% and LinkedIn up 83%.
However, there’s a cautionary tale to heed here. Whilst social media is undoubtedly popular and an asset to the recruitment process, clients have told us that it’s sheer size creates a lot of noise which can be distracting for companies and job seekers. I believe that using social media solely as a method of recruitment will be less efficient and less effective unless it is utilised in conjunction with a job board like s1jobs.
At s1jobs we have introduced a social media sharing function, which is a free value-add to our clients, enabling them to share s1jobs vacancies on their social networks. Integrating social media with our product will drive efficiencies and lead to even better return on investment.
ROI in the recruitment process is all about quality applications. If companies were to use social media without the optimised infrastructure of a component similar to the s1jobs product, then they will undoubtedly lose quality applications. Candidates tell us they don’t want the hassle of registering on every employer site. They just want what’s proven to work, they want the familiar setting of s1jobs. Harnessing s1jobs alongside the ‘word of mouth’ aspect of social will reap the best returns.
All that said, our impressive statistics speak volumes, and more recently we have been turning our attention to the Generation Y’s, and hot on their heels, Generation Z’s. These are candidates who have been weaned on technology, and their approach and expectations towards recruitment and the hiring process is light years away from previous generations.
They’ve grown up in a highly sophisticated media and computer environment and have a deep empathy with the Internet, so as recruiters, we need to fully embrace social media and the nature of its immediacy if we are going to get them to engage with us on their terms.
The success of our recent figures highlights the significance that social media has on sourcing the right candidates when used with the weight of s1jobs, the number one job board in Scotland, behind it.
Folks, 2016 is still in its infancy and I’d like to take this opportunity to wish Gen Y’s, Gen Z’s and plain old Gen X’s “Sláinte, a guid New Year and mony mair may ye see!”
