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Abstract
LinkedIn is a business-oriented social networking service. It provides tools to build and manage professional networks. But it especially gives recruiters a quick and easy access to a large range of resumes from skilled potential employees all around the world. The purpose of this paper is to explore how the ten biggest companies in different European countries (Norway, France and Germany) use LinkedIn for hiring as compared with corporate websites. In addition, we compared the number of employees with the number of employees who are members in company's page on LinkedIn. In the theory part, we found that LinkedIn is a very important recruiting tool for companies. Our overall finding is that LinkedIn is not used by companies as much as theory suggests it should be. The investigated companies seem to lack encouraging their employees to update their LinkedIn profile regularly. We cannot conclude that there is a correlation between the number of jobs offered and the number of followers. The results and discussion show that job postings on corporate websites compared to the job boards on LinkedIn are much higher for the Norwegian and French companies. This result differs from the German companies where we observed that four companies have more jobs posted on LinkedIn than on their corporate website. This research is limited to quantitative data.
Keywords: LinkedIn, recruitment, job boards, Human Resources, corporate websites
Introduction
Social media recruitment is a process of hiring new employees with the use of social media such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+, Twitter and many other social media sites which are popular in certain geographical areas or countries, for example, Weibo (China) or VKontakte (Russia). There are a lot of tactics, strategies and steps on how to achieve a good social media recruitment process and the whole social HR has a lot of benefits and drawbacks that are going to be described in the paper. In 2012, 80% of companies were using social media for recruitment and 95% of them were using LinkedIn (Isaacson, 2012). So we can safely assume that currently the first number will be much closer to 100% and almost every company is now using LinkedIn as a hiring tool.
LinkedIn has over 332 million members in over 200 countries, and it...