Mediaboss Marketing

In this Jan. 28, 2011 file photo, the exterior view of LinkedIn headquarters is shown in Mountain View, Calif.

Associated Press

With the growth of social media sites like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, as well as lesser-known sites Upspring, PerfectBusiness and Cofoundr professional networking with the use of social media as a recruitment tool is becoming more prominent.

Most employee recruiters 92 percent currently use, or plan to use, social media and networking sites for job recruiting this year, according to the Jobvite 2012 Social Recruitment Survey. This is a 3 percent increase from 2011 and 10 percent increase from 2010.

The most-used social media site, when it comes to recruitment and hiring, is LinkedIn: 89 percent of U.S. businesses have made a hire through it, compared to Facebook at 26 percent and Twitter at 15 percent.

"Social media, on the whole, is becoming a medium for work as well as play," as quoted in a report, "The Impact of Social Media," in 2011 from Nigel Wright Recruitment, a U.K.-based search firm with international influence to help connect highly qualified job candidates with businesses.

The report emphasizes how social networking is changing the nature of recruitment and how "essentially, companies and recruiters need to be where their candidates are in order to engage them in the recruitment process."

Finding someone to hire is becoming less labor intensive, and for those seeking jobs, "what used to take a tremendous amount of legwork on the part of the candidate can now be done through a quick search on the web," Chirag Nangia, CEO of Reppify said in a Q&A for Forbes.com. Reppify is a San Francisco-based business that helps companies find people to hire with the use of social media data.

Though applying and hiring can take place simply by sitting behind a computer, there are still things both parties have to do for the Internet, and specifically social media, to be an effective tool in job recruitment.

Chirag offers three recommendations to job seekers when it comes to their social media: Keep professional profiles up to date and complete, engage in online communities reflecting topics the candidate is passionate about, and network with professional connections on LinkedIn.

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Social media as job recruitment tool, up in 2012