Kiwis use Twitter to find work

Use social networks to research employers. Photo / Getty Images

Social media is influencing how companies hire workers and how people search for jobs, but it still has a long way to go.

Only 1 per cent of respondents to a survey by recruitment agency Kelly Services said they had secured their most recent job through social media.

People used Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter to look for jobs but 27 per cent of survey respondents said they secured their most recent position from online job postings.

Debbie Grenfell, Kelly Services New Zealand managing director, said this type of recruiting is still in its infancy.

"The survey shows people use social media sites to look for jobs. However, where they're securing their jobs from is still very much in the online job-board space," Grenfell said.

Predictably, more Gen-Y jobseekers used Facebook with Baby Boomers preferring LinkedIn.

"Social media is our future. It's starting to impact the way we source candidates and the way people go about looking for jobs," said Grenfell.

She said employers and recruiters should build up their talent pools online, particularly with people who are not actively looking for work.

"Perhaps by building a network of people who specialise in a particular area or role type and starting to build some communities so that we're not necessarily waiting on people to apply for jobs," Grenfell said.

"We're being a little bit more proactive about that because talent is scarce."

But she said there was a downside to employment information being available online as competitors and head hunters could troll social media sites, particularly LinkedIn, to poach top talent.

Grenfell encouraged people to control their online presence and, according to the survey, about 30 per cent of women and 28 per cent of men reported censoring or editing their personal social network content.

But about 25 per cent of men and 22 per cent of women were worried content could adversely impact their careers.

Even though half of employers globally used social media to perform check on job candidates, Grenfell said people shoudn't be too worked up.

"I don't think businesses these days would certainly have the time or the resource to investigate everyone on social media."

Grenfell said she wouldn't like to see a world where employers want to see all a person's personal information before they are hired.

"You can never know everything there is to know about a person. They can have as much or as little as they want in the public domain."

The survey obtained the views of more than 1800 people in New Zealand, and 97,000 worldwide.