Everyone is talking about social media these days. Open a newspaper or news magazine and you’re bound to find a headline touting LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook’s popularity with North American job seekers. If you’re a hospitality employer or recruiter, you may have even considered focusing your hiring efforts on these newer recruiting tools and ditching the old—including the job board.
Don’t do it. Job boards continue to be among the smartest methods a restaurant or hotel hiring manager can use to source and connect with qualified candidates—and niche job boards, like Hcareers.com, are even better. In fact, job boards often trump social media for the following reasons.
Social Media Requires Time
Young people spend numerous hours on social media every week. Why, you ask? Because reading people’s postings, commenting, and creating their own posts takes a lot of time. It’s even worse if you’re a recruiter. You have to invest significant time to search for relevant content to post—or make your assistant do it for you. You have to update your pages and compose engaging tweets. And you have to do it all constantly if you want to keep the attention of those potential hospitality employees.
This can be especially difficult because most social media users aren’t on the sites to look for jobs. In fact, a 2011 Pew Research Center survey found that 66 percent use social media to stay in touch with friends and family. Fifty percent want to connect with old friends, while 14 percent want to interact with other people who have similar hobbies and interests. Job searching didn’t even make the list.
Job Boards are Efficient
If you need to fill an assistant hotel manager, wait staff, or front desk position fast, use a job board. Doing so requires only a small investment of time. Just write your job description, post it to a niche job board such as Hcareers.com, and connect with thousands of active hospitality job seekers—all with very little effort.
Most job seekers actually prefer job boards. In 2012, Millennial Branding surveyed 5,268 adults across three generations, including Generation Y (18 to 29-year-olds), Generation X (30 to 47-year-olds), and Baby Boomers (48 to 67-year-olds). Despite the popularity of social networking, most of these job seekers relied on job boards as their primary resource. Eight-seven percent of Boomers used job boards, followed by 82 percent of Gen X and 77 percent of Gen Y.
Social media may very well have a place in your hotel or restaurant recruiting arsenal. However, it should not become your primary tool. Instead, stick with job boards like Hcareers.com. They’re efficient, easy to use, and offer unbeatable results.