Over half of Romanian recruiters used social sites for hiring

The professional social networking site LinkdIn is the favorite of 85% of those polled, 21% turn to Facebook, and only 5% to Twitter.

“Social media is a very powerful tool in the hiring process usually for middle and entry level positions, rather than for top management. Romanian recruiters turn to social sites for searching job candidates with 1-2 year experience or 3-6 year experience”, said Daniela Gheorghe, health insurance director at Certasig, who will graduate from the MBA program in summer this year.

Tatiana Mircea, HR manager of the telecom company Nobel Romania, said that when she was in the position to search a candidate for a global position in a company, she turned to a recruitment agency while browsing through LinkdIn profiles.

“Finally, we hired the person we found on LinkdIn and stopped using the services of the recruitment agency. In order to be able to view candidates’ profiles on LinkdIn, we paid $198, the standard fee to post an advertisement. The feedback we received from the job advertisement were far superior than we had received via the recruitment agency”, said Mircea.

Some of the advantages of using social media sites consist in the low fees charged for obtaining access to a database, compared to classic recruitment websites, finding the candidates that are not available on the market or the possibility of viewing the credentials of the job candidate.

“Using social sites as a recruitment tool hasn’t changed the hiring process. The methods are still the traditional ones; it is the way we approach candidates that changed”, said the managing director of ASEBUSS, Lavinia Rasca.

The daily average of web users in Romania is 3.7 million. 37% of them use internet to access search engines, 22% for reading newspapers and magazines, and 35% for e-mail services and only 4% are looking for a job online.