Web 2.0 doubles sales growth of recruiters compared to non-users

Stan Beer
Thursday, 20 November 2008 11:59

IT People - Recruitment

A new survey of US recruiters has found that early adopters using social networking for recruiting and branding had double the sales growth of those without the new tools.

According to the CedarCrestone 2008–2009 HR Systems Survey, which tracks technology use within the HR industry, more than half of the 800 respondents to its survey are not using or still evaluating Web 2.0 technologies.

Instant messaging and internal blogs are used by about a third of respondents and social networking and the collaborative tools are used by just 10%, according to the survey

"While there is a lot of buzz about Web 2.0 technologies and social networking, adoption is in the arena of early adopters," the report states.

"In fact, Web 2.0 is at the bottom of the list of initiatives we track, along with BPEL (Business Process Execution Language for Web Services) and SOA (Service Oriented Architecture)," the report adds.

Twice as many early adopters, often from high-tech and financial services industries, along with a few of the large consulting firms have been the first to take advantage of applications such as Facebook and collaborative wikis.

"We found that these organizations using social networking for recruiting and branding had double the sales growth of organizations without these tools," the report states.

As big players such as Oracle and SAP offer these Web 2.0 innovations, the tools gain credibility in organizational settings, according to the report:

"Oracle has introduced the notion of Employee 2.0 that allows employees to interact with each other using tools such as instant messaging, chat, blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, newsfeeds, and virtual worlds all within a secure environment.

"These capabilities are available today in Oracle’s WebCenter and Beehive suites which deliver Social Networking structures and tools. In 2009 capabilities will be built into PeopleTools, giving organizations the ability to embed and call to these 2.0 capabilities in secure ERP pages.

"SAP has also demonstrated investment in Web 2.0 initiatives for some time now across several of its HCM (human capital management) product areas, including the use of SAP Collaboration Portal features, as well as the redesign of applications with Mash-up’s as seen, for example, in its Travel Management solution.

"SAP will continue leveraging and investing in these concepts, and is planning mid-term for a complete Social Networking structure supporting such Web 2.0 solutions across HCM."