Are people hiring through online social networks? Yes. Would they have hired them through a different means? Yes. The interesting bit is are these tools more efficient at getting higher quality candidates? Yes & No. It all depends how you use them.

There are a lot of snake oil sellers out there at the moment and I would suggest to anyone looking at hiring a consultant/vendor in social recruiting, social media etc etc to look at their digital footprints. Do they really walk the talk or are they just talking the talk.

Finally will these tools and services disrupt job boards in the same way as job boards disrupt newspaper classifieds? Not in their current forms but maybe eventually.

Social media is all the rage at the moment but it is not new, people have been publishing online for 20 years, remember Usenet? Let’s not forget the first social technology was the reply all button in email. That feature allowed a single individual to collaborate with a large group online. The difference is that the accessibility has changed.

Oh & yes stay tuned to http://www.talentsource.com.au/ for some survey results in the future.

I have no doubt job boards will need to integrate a social media capacity to their sites moving forward and the job boards who do this will then discover how to further monetise their site and have even more monthly duration across their site.

We are working with a few job boards here in the UK to implement just that.

A job board with a social media outlet, that both Employer and candidate can engage more easily, now how can Twitter or any other site beat that.

Indeed, there is a paucity of data and we know very little about usage, success rate in a recruitment context within Australia. However, there is no doubt social media/networks are getting a lot of attention. The opportunity/tools for candidates and employers to find each other is increasing by the day.

We are in the process of trying to understand more about sources of talent in our study http://www.talentsource.com.au . It will be interesting to compare how each channel performs.

The question: Yes or No – have you EVER hired someone from a social network? 66% yes, at some point in their lives, they’ve used a social network to hire someone.

That is a VERY different stat to “What proportion of your hires comes from a social networking sites”. That would not be 66% in any country in the world.

An equivalent would be ‘Have you ever got on an aeroplane to go to somewhere to work?” to which the answer might be 75% of people say yes. Quite different to the idea that three quarters of people commute to work on aeroplanes.

I’d also be interested in the supplementary question which is “Would you have hired that person through referrals or another means anyway if social networking websites did not exist?”

I’d really focus on actual data, numbers or empirical evidence that “Social Recruiting is gaining grounds” (against what?) in any long term structurally significant way for the whole market, rather than this quasi-significant PR.