The world of work is changing. New trends are emerging that will affect the work environments of large corporations and small businesses alike. How much will new practices change the way we work over the next year?

Seeking answers on how job seekers and recruiters use social media, what they think about Smartworking and personal or employer branding, The 2015 Work Trends Study by Adecco Group, the world’s leading provider of HR solutions finds that job seeking is ever more mobile, as is the workplace.

The role of social networks in the job seeking and recruiting processes is becoming more and more relevant. Furthermore, new trends are emerging, such as smart working, which will affect the work environments of companies and will require new thinking on the traditional relationship between employer and employee.

The Adecco’s study was conducted on 31,000 job seekers and more than 4,100 recruiters from 26 countries sharing their opinions and experiences on the use of social media for recruitment and job search practices.

The analysed data provides insights into the use of social media for professional purposes, its effectiveness in matching job seekers with open positions, the relevance of web reputation and its impact on recruiting, as well as new emerging trends such as smartworking, whereby flexibility of the workplace will be key to the future of work.

Interesting factors emerge from the key findings to guide both recruiters and job seekers in improving the efficiency and effectiveness of their online activity. Among social networks, LinkedIn remains the most popular platform for professional purposes, for both recruiters (61%) and job seekers (34%), whereas Facebook is the go-to network for all social activities including personal branding.

For job seekers, the probability of being contacted by a recruiter increases with the number of social networks they use: by being active on one network, the probability of being contacted by a recruiter is 16% but increases to 46% when a candidate uses all five of the main global platforms.

The study highlights that job seekers are more ‘mobile’ than recruiters: 65% of job seekers frequently or sometimes use a mobile device for online job searches, whereas among recruiters, this figure drops to 41% when searching for a candidate or highlighting open positions.

See: Social Media Recruitment: Hiring Manager’s New Fad?

Key findings based on Adecco’s study are:

• LinkedIn is for job searches but Facebook defines reputation. Both job seekers and recruiters have named LinkedIn as the platform for their job seeking and recruiting activities, while job seekers also use Facebook for personal branding and to check out what others say about employers. Recruiters use both LinkedIn and Facebook to check out a candidate’s personality.
• In terms of total time spent online in job search or recruitment activities, both job seekers and recruiters spend most of their time with job boards and corporate websites, rather than social media. Recruiters expect the importance of social media to grow in 2016.
• One third of job seekers use mobile devices for online job searches, leaving the question for companies whether their websites and online application systems are mobile friendly.
• Reputation becomes an increasingly important topic, both for recruiters and job seekers. While recruiters already stated in the Global Social Recruiting Study 2014 that they have rejected candidates based on their social profiles, now also job seekers make a point of not only researching the company they are applying to, but also their point of contact
• Those familiar with the concept of Smartworking defined it as flexibility in working time and flexibility of workplace. Others defined it as flexibility in work methods and work tools (bring your own device).
• Recruiters felt that Smartworking is more suited to middle and senior managers rather than non-managerial roles, and for permanent positions as opposed to temporary or part-time roles. They considered Smartworking solutions to be particularly suitable for workers who live very far from their workplace, disabled workers and workers with childcare responsibilities.

Finally, it reveals that flexibility in an individual’s place of work will become the key to new styles of work in the future. Even though the majority of job seekers and almost half of the recruiters have never heard of the Smartworking concept, they showed strong interest in integrating Smartworking solutions into their daily practices.

While job seekers are more open to smartworking solutions, recruiters are more cautious in appreciating them. The emergence of new concepts such as Smartworking will create new interactions between employers and employee.

News source: onrec.com

Also read: Top 11 Modern Recruitment Marketing Practices to Attract and Hire Talent

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