The myriad of headlines in the talent acquisition and space are misleading and, at times, spellbinding.  With the social sharing features on many web sites, the headlines go viral and become truth (for many).

That was one of the topics at the webinar last week “recruiting secrets overheard in a dark alley”, in addition to not believing everything you see online.  The slides to the webinar are below, and we’re working on including the recording which will be added soon.

Here is an example used which included 4 recent headlines (none of which are true in my book) and I’m sure could somehow be justified or validated depending on how the data is sliced.  They all completely contradict each other.

• Facebook is the #1 recruiting source, accounting for 78% of hires
• Employee referrals are the #1 recruiting source, accounting for nearly ½ of all hires
• Job boards are not dead, they are alive and well – accounting for nearly 40% of all hires
• Nearly 2/3 of hires found their job through “internal sources”

And as I stated during the call, even though Bush had some issues pronouncing the word nuclear, he could have figured this out..

As far as the webinar, we included a list of questions as part of the registration which included hundreds of recruiters from 20 countries and 49 states.  We also asked a couple of questions (via polling) during the webinar, which are listed below but are not included in the slides.

Here are  5 examples of the responses from attendees, the practitioners:

• 71% of recruiters have not hired 1 person via twitter
• 64% of recruiters have not hired 1 person via Facebook
• 82% of recruiters HAVE hired from LinkedIn, and
• A vast majority would refer fewer than 10 people they know to a job (re-defining referrals)
• 50% do not have a personal or company twitter account which primary use is for recruiting

So what’s the #1 recruiting source? LinkedIn was the #1 most effective recruiting source selected.

I’m not saying social recruiting doesn’t work, or that it doesn’t make sense.  What I am saying is the headlines floating around are at times, laughable.  That, and we still see time after time anti-social recruiting attempts at social recruiting.

Enjoy the show..

Data sources include: CLC Recruiting, International Association of Employment Websites, Applied HRM Research, Workforce, Branchout, LinkedIn, Monster.com, CareerBuilder, The Sourcing Institue, Journal of Applied Business Research, Google, Foursquare, Google+, Slideshare, YouTube, Forbes, ERE, TechCrunch, Mashable, iCIMS, SilkRoad, jobs2web, JobVite, Workforce.com, Corporate Executive Board, Webinar Participant Polling – Recruiting Secrets, Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, SlideShare, TechCrunch, YouTube, Mashable, Pinterest, Comscore, Xavier.edu, International Personnel Management Association.