Even The Employed Are Looking For New Jobs: The Social Media Is Helping Them Find One

The job market is becoming even harder for the unemployed facing competition from unlikely contenders for the job space.  A recent survey by recruiting platform Jobvite showed that the jobless Americans are not the only ones hunting for jobs, even the employed are keen on changing their current jobs.

The study reveals that 69 percent of the employed who responded to the survey said that they were open to the idea of getting a new job and were using the social media to search for one. According to the Social Job Seeker Survey one in six employed respondents say that they got their job through the social media and most access Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter to search for new jobs.

Dan Finnigan, president and chief executive of Jobvite said that “Inside every employed worker is a job seeker. Because of pent-up demand now that the economy is growing, those workers are looking for the next step in their career.”

The survey found that a majority preferred Facebook over the other two sites and a quarter of the respondents said that they updated their profile and professional information whilst 17 percent said they gave their Facebook information on a job application or during an interview. 8 percent said that they used the site to contact a prospective employer whilst 6 percent met up with recruiters on the site. Nearly half of the respondents said that that they had used their Facebook contacts to benefit their careers.

Finnigan says, “It is extremely important to be a well-rounded job hunter, and that absolutely includes maintaining your professional presence on the three most-used social networks for recruiting: Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. For many professional and managerial careers, that begins with LinkedIn, as it is the leading social network geared toward people in professional occupations.”

Finnigan said that that more and more job hunters were onto social networking because they were getting frustrated when their online job searches were not yielding results. They understood that people not search engines would be the better bet. Moreover, it is a medium that the current generation is comfortable with.

Even though there is a large pool of jobs on these sites, he says that online interaction can never substitute for an in-person meeting with the employers and prospective co-workers.

Just as the job seekers are looking for jobs on these sites, employers and recruiters are also looking for appropriate candidates to fill their vacancies. Jobvite’s earlier researches had revealed that 86 percent of recruiters turn to social profiles for candidates. So it would be strongly advised that candidates keep their profiles updated and that their social-media content is professional and proper.

80 percent of recruiters say that they prefer candidates who include details of their participation in professional organizations in their profiles as opposed to those who don’t.  Yet, job seekers overlook this fact and only one in five posts such information.

One reason that is being proffered for such a high percentage of the already-employment seeking to find new jobs, is that during the sluggish economy they latched on to the first available job, even though it was underpaying, not matching their qualifications and certainly not something that they wanted to do forever.

The heartening rate of unemployment has given them hope that they can be where they rightly belong.