BCjobs Blog

It is undeniable that the culture of BC is shifting quickly along with the pace of technology. A few years ago very few people knew of Facebook and now it is hard to find someone who is not on it. Generation F- the Facebook generation, refers to those of us who have grown up “online”. This is a generation who is highly capable of retrieving information on the net.

Think back three short years when skilled candidates were scarce. Some businesses closing their doors for lack of employees; wages at Tim Horton’s in Alberta rose close to $20/hour, university students were working all summer, and even if you were fortunate enough to hire skilled employees, retaining them was another matter!

Jessica Lee, corporate recruiter, discusses the ins and outs of social recruiting — using social networking sites to identify and recruit potential hires. She examines how to create a strategy, establish goals and define measurement tools and success, while ultimately looking to increase job applications and improve brand awareness.

Last week, SourceCon ran the first part of an article series on Twitter’s Hiring Strategies, outlining some of the significant new hires Twitter has made this year. I also showed you the video that Twitter put out to help its recruiting efforts. I was able to grab about 30 minutes with Twitter’s director of recruiting, Oliver Ryan, and talk to him about some of the recruiting and hiring practices that Twitter has in place for its internal efforts. While Twitter has talked with several tech media publishers about their recruiting video, this is the first time it has talked about their recruiting practices directly with the HR, recruiting, and sourcing community.

On the average day, I read somewhere between 10 and 50 job postings. Yes, the life of a professional recruiter is not a glamorous one – shocking but true. Also shocking and true is the fact that 90% of those job ads have something in common that limits their effectiveness in a huge way.

The Canadian labour market consists of nearly 1 million finance professionals; 1.1 million workers in the Educational Services sector; and just over 950,000 professionals in Public Administration. All of these are examples of sizable, high-impact industries within our economy.

6. Social media is only used by kids looking to socialize with their friends.

More than half of Facebook users are outside of college.
The fastest growing demographic is that of those 30 years old and older.
The average age of a LinkedIn user is 45, and the average age of a Twitter user is 31.