The facts are straight forward: around 80% of candidates don’t have an active LinkedIn profile. Globally, the World Bank puts the available workforce at roughly 3.453 Billion people. This means that at most, less than 17% of professionals are on LinkedIn. Taking into consideration the fact that many profiles on LinkedIn are fake, duplicated, or represent people outside the workforce (including students and retirees), the estimate could be closer to 15%. David Galley of Boolean Strings wrote a recent post about these data points. It was an eye opening moment for me – simply put, there are a lot of candidates that we’re missing out on.
Just think for a second– in the past few years what has been your main resource for finding candidates online? I’m sure you’re like most Recruiters who utilize LinkedIn or a job board. Have we’ve all gotten lazy with sourcing these days? Honestly, I would say our industry has. We want a simple end-all solution for finding candidates and LinkedIn has become the main talent pool for most Recruiters and Sourcers.
Facebook is the new LinkedIn
Facebook is the largest social network across the globe thanks to many acquisitions like WhatsApp and Instagram. There are roughly 1.73 Billion monthly active users on Facebook. If Facebook is not part of your daily sourcing routine, you need to start using it now. Maybe you’re like me and don’t feel comfortable using your personal profile when sourcing. No problem– just create a professional recruiter profile. When you connect with users, odds are they have an email or cell phone connected to their account. I’ve written several posts on scraping Facebook, here are some reviews of tools that help you do that: Dig Extension, ZAPinfo, Toolkit for FB, and FB Audience Blaster.
Scraping data is the wild west of talent sourcing. We’re just taping into this resource. There’s virtually an endless amount of personal data on Facebook. Recruiters and Sourcers can use this to create a new pool of candidates.
Final Thoughts
We all need to get more creative with our sourcing efforts. Don’t just rely on job boards or LinkedIn recruiter anymore– you will end up reaching out to the same pool of candidates your competition has already reached out to. I challenge you to explore other social networks like Facebook. There’s a huge pool of candidates that are active on this network. It’s time for all of us to step up our game in sourcing outside of LinkedIn.
Update: These are only rough numbers and we do know exactly how many active profiles are on LinkedIn. The main point of this article is more about showcasing why recruiters need to look outside of the same talent pool. Facebook eventually will become the new LinkedIn.
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Your numbers are skewed a bit, but your point is on the money. Example, approximate US population is 328 million, of which 38% percent is employed (a long time macro economic fact), or 124 million people in the workforce within the US.
Number of current US LinkedIn users? Well apparently 154 million, which makes sense since most retirees have not deleted their accounts since joining, so we have a natural inflation of users, and of that about 45% are active monthly users, so let’s say what we really have are 70 million US users that will be valid response targets for recruiters.
So 70M of 124M, and that is in full aggregate. Of course realize that the retirees and college students make up a portion of the active users, let’s assume the retirees outweigh college students 2.5 to 1, rough estimate, and we know that 10% of the LI population is college age. If we apply that logic directly to the 70M, we lose 21M, and now we have 49 of the 125M in the workforce…which seems like a more viable number.