Month: July 2012

If you’re not using social media as part of your recruiting efforts yet, here’s some motivation: revenue from social networking sites is expected to rise a whopping 43.1 percent this year, hitting a total of $16.9 billion.

That’s according to a new forecast on social media revenue from Gartner, which examined past revenue from sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and asked analysts how that revenue will grow over the coming years.

What does this have to do with recruiting? It means that more people are going to be using social media sites and more companies are going to figure out how to monetize the actions from those users.

So it only makes sense that you establish a presence on all the popular social media sites now, so you can interact with the online community and find some great candidates by advertising your jobs or tapping into your networks’ connections.

Here are some interesting facts from the report:

  • Social media revenue is expected to rise from $11.8 billion in 2011 to $16.9 billion this year, making for an increase of 43.1 percent.
  • Revenue from social networking sites should reach $34 billion by 2016.
  • Advertising accounts for the largest portion of revenue from social media sites, expected to hit $8.8 billion this year, followed by social gaming at $6.2 billion, and subscriptions at $278 million.
  • The number of people using social media will grow at a moderate pace as competition and new technologies keeps people engaged.
  • Marketing departments are going to spend more of their advertising budgets on social media sites.

“New revenue opportunities will exist in social media, but no new services will be able to bring significant fresh revenue to social media by 2016,” Neha Gupta, a senior research analyst with Gartner, said. “The biggest impact of growth in social media is on the advertisers.

“In the short and medium terms, social media sites should deploy data analytic techniques that interrogate social networks to give marketers a more accurate picture of trends about consumers’ needs and preferences on a customized basis,” she added. “In the meantime, however, they should also continue to exploit other channels of revenue like mobile advertising and social commerce.”

We live in a society where the line between work and free time is too easily and too often blurred, but most employers still don’t have a policy in place to deal with working after hours.

“Technology and Its Impact on Employees During Nonworking Hours,” a new report from SHRM, found that a large majority of employers don’t have anything in writing dictating what their staff members can and can’t do when working outside of the office.

However, most typical employees still feel guilty if they don’t respond to emails at night or on the weekend, even if doing so is not technically part of their job description. That’s because most companies rely on organizational norms, not written policies, to dictate such behavior.

“Employers are not creating policies that delve into employees working outside of the traditional workday,” Evren Esen, manager of SHRM’s Survey Research Center, said in a press release. “Whether an employee responds to email at night or during the weekend is usually linked to organizational norms. If there is such an expectation, then employees are likely to follow suit.”

Some highlights of the report include:

  • Only 21 percent of companies have a formal policy in place regulating the use of wireless communication devices during non-working hours.
  • About 26 percent of organizations have an informal policy in place, while 81 percent of those rely on managers to relay rules to employees.
  • Of the companies that don’t have any policy in place dealing with working after hours, 87 percent allow employees to set their own limitations.
  • Employers are more concerned about how much their employees are working after hours if the work is being done on a company-owned device.

Ultimately, employers should make it a priority to develop an after-hours working policy, whether the employee is using company-provided equipment or not. Companies that have no policy in place could be leaving themselves open to lawsuits for not paying proper overtime.

There is lots of advice out there about how you can find your next job on Facebook, but now it seems that the popular social networking site is going to make that task even easier by launching its own job board.

A recent article from NASDAQ claims that Facebook is planning to launch its own job board later this summer, although the article couldn’t credit its source, saying only that the information came from “people familiar with the matter.”

If it does become a reality, the job board could pose a huge threat to competitors – specifically LinkedIn – as well as other companies that develop apps to help companies showcase their jobs on Facebook.

“In recent years, the success of sites like LinkedIn, which merge users’ personal and professional histories with information about jobs, have put pressure on once-dominant sites like Monster.com,” the article notes. “While job seekers once considered sharing information on Facebook to be a liability when finding a job, today a host of companies, including those partnering in the new job board, have popped up promising to better match job seekers and recruiters using profile information from Facebook users.”

According to NASDAQ’s sources, the job board will aggregate job openings from other third-party providers, making those jobs available to all users. Facebook also plans to involve BranchOut, Jobvite, and Work4 Labs – all of which currently use Facebook for recruiting purposes – in the new effort.

Not much else is clear about how the new job board will operate, although Facebook does plan to make the service available for free, at least initially.

As everyone anxiously awaits tomorrow’s employment numbers, a separate report is showing that companies are making the lowest number of layoffs in over a year.

The most recent report from Challenger, Gray & Christmas found that employers made 37,551 layoffs during June, a whopping 39 percent decrease from May, and marking the lowest number of job cuts in the last 13 months.

Although we’re not out of the woods yet, this is a huge step in the right direction, and offers a glimmer of hope at a time when many people are predicting that the economy is still getting worse.

“Even with recent signs that the economy is headed for another summer slump or worse, including the first contraction in manufacturing activity in three years, employers appear reluctant to shed too many workers,” Challenger CEO John A. Challenger said in a press release. “While it does not take long to shrink payrolls, it can take a significant amount of time to rebuild them, particularly as reports of the growing skills gap becomes more widespread.”

Even more encouraging is that the biggest job cuts in June were in education, just in time for schools and universities to wrap up things for the summer. And even that industry’s 6,569 layoffs were down 36 percent from last year.

“Continued weakness in the recovery will further delay hiring, which will, in turn, further delay the full recovery,” Challenger said. “Whether or not we see an  increase in job cuts depends on the length and severity of the recovery’s slowdown.

“However, barring some major economic catastrophe, companies in  the U.S. are likely to hold steady for the remainder of the year,” he added. “We probably  will not see a major ramp up in hiring or firing; certainly, not before the November elections. Even after the election and regardless of who wins, it  could be several months until companies understand the full implications of  the outcome and how to plan for the future.”

Check out the full report for more info on what industries and states are seeing the most layoffs, the top reasons companies are letting people go, and the industries planning to hire in the coming months.

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