2012 was a great year in recruiting.  After attending several recent events and networking with recruiters, recruiting leaders, and job seekers now is a great time to reflect back and publish what we’ve recently heard as the top 7 recruiting #fails in 2012.

• #7 – Recruiting with Pinterest:  Gag.  Enough said.

• #6 – Mobile Recruiting:  Mobile recruiting is a hot topic and has been for a couple of years. What’s being defined as a fail is the pace at which it is being adopted and the integration within recruiting processes, the candidate experience and job applications. The good news is there is a tremendous amount of work taking place and companies like JIBE are paving the way.

• #5 – The Taleo Acquisition:  2012 was the year for acquisitions in the HR Tech space. Word on the street is the Taleo acquisition by Oracle can be defined as catastrophic.

• #4 – Social Recruiting: You can access “The Truth About Social Recruiting Headlines” for some of the statistics we gathered earlier this year. Companies like find.ly and Cachinko are 2 examples that have been mentioned as social recruiting losers.

• #3 – Talent Communities:  Pick the buzzword from network to community, the concept is often mis-labeled, mis-classified, and isn’t well defined.  Just ask job seekers for their opinion.  One group recently shared, “Talent Communities, my A$$. Figure out the basics and deliver on those. Signing up for a job alert isn’t the definition of community”.

• #2 – BranchOut: 7 months ago BranchOut received an additional $25 million in funding and was boasting 25 million members. Fast forward to today, the app has plummeted to usage between 1.9 million to 2.8 million monthly active users – from 13.5 million earlier this year. The comedy behind this is some of the reporting that called BranchOut the LinkedIn killer just earlier this year.

• #1 – The Facebook Job Board:  A few weeks ago I published “The Facebook Job Board Debacle” referring to the social jobs partnership so I won’t rehash it. I’ll simply add a quote from a conversation last week with a Fortune 500 recruiting leader who stated, “The 5 organizations behind one of the biggest recruiting fails in the past 5 years should be spanked, and spanked hard”.

Have other examples to share? Feel free to email them in, or leave them in comments. Cheers to 2013!