Did you know Maine is one of the weakest places to find social-media-savvy job candidates? It’s one stat tossed out today from Doug Berg, stats which in many cases are useful in targeting e-mails, tweets, and other recruitment marketing.
Berg, from Jobs2Web, was speaking at today’s #socialrecruiting summit at Microsoft in Redmond, and was using a large database of traffic sent to corporate career sites this year from LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. Some interesting data, based on 225,000 visitors:
- Who’s driving traffic? LinkedIn is driving the most job-related traffic (47%) to career sites, followed by Facebook (30%) and Twitter (16%).
- When do people view jobs? Well, “people hate their jobs right away on Monday,” Berg jokes, talking about stats that show Monday and Tuesday are high traffic days.
- When do people check Twitter? Often, Monday, Thursday, and Friday, mid-afternoon Central time.
- And Facebook? It’s a little slower in the morning. Mid-day is a high-traffic time for job-hunting, with strong traffic continuing throughout the day.
- LinkedIn is somewhat similar, “steady and strong,” Berg says, saying that even in the early evening, at 7 p.m. Central, traffic in job postings on LinkedIn is strong. Monday, Tuesday, and Friday are good days for LinkedIn, and the mornings are busier than on other social media recruiting sites.
- As far as physical locations, the most popular states for Twitter users are, in order, California first, followed by Washington state, New York, and Texas. Maine is the smallet market.
- For Facebook, Washington is slightly less popular; instead, Texas is the second-largest market, behind California.
- California, Washington, and Texas are the biggest LinkedIn markets.
- Engineers look at jobs online often mid-week, but there’s a decent amount of traffic on weekends. They’re busy thinking of jobs mid-day, but traffic spikes up again around 8 p.m. Central. Monday’s their biggest day for Facebook.
- Engineers are far, far more interested in finding jobs on Twitter on Monday than on any other day. Overall — though Monday is the exception — on most days, LinkedIn beats Facebook and Twitter for recruiting engineers, according to Berg’s numbers.
- Very few people (23 out of 10,000 in a Twitter visitor sample) find a job listing through a Twitter job search. They’re more likely to find them through a “follow” or a retweet, such as CareerBuilder retweeting a job listing.
- “I just don’t think a lot of people are using their mobile devices to look at job content yet online,” Berg says, showing that a low number of jobs sent via Twitter are accessed by a mobile device.
- “Tell me that LinkedIn is truly a passive candidate network,” Berg says, smiling, showing that the site is a candidate-rich source of people willing to talk to recruiters.
- “Job aggregators produce a tremendous amount of hiring success,” he says. Social media networks are not often the source of hires, but that’s partly because, Berg says, many companies aren’t sufficiently tracking them. Stay tuned, he says, because those numbers are likely to change in the future.