Social media monitoring service Reppler recently surveyed more than 300 hiring professionals to determine when and how job recruiters are screening job candidates on different social networks. The study found that:

90% recruiters said they use social networks to screen prospective employees

76% use facebook (how scary for young people) 53% use twitter 48% use linkedin

47% use right after they receive an application

69% have rejected an applicant bcz of what they saw about them on a social networking site (they broke this down further into very interesting sub categories)

68% also hired because of what they saw on a social network

How Recruiters use Social Networks to Screen Candidates

Based on these stats most kids won't be able to get a job when they grow up

I wonder if it counts against the candidate if their privacy settings are correctly set so that no one except family and friends see their unflattering moments online.

Privacy settings are great. Many people unfortunately don't use them. I wonder how many people have learned this lesson the hard way. I wonder how many people have two accounts, one public where they wear their halo the other one private where they wear nothing

I wonder how much a recruiters own personal preferences go into making those decisions too. For example if you're some uptight recruiter with no sense of humor and I was applying for a job as a trainer at some posh resort and they saw one of my blog posts titled: shakin that a** workout or a youtube video called grab your balls (this is a real video posted by another trainer on youtube). Would they pass you over bcz they felt you were too outrageous even if you had much better qualifications than another applicant.

I'm soooooo happy that I've been self employed for most of my adult life. Job hunting sounds so much more complicated than it was when I graduated from college and even 10 years ago when I started training clients in health clubs.

Simply put, social recruiting is using social media channels for recruiting. The term refers to different ways of using social media networks (such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc.) and websites (blogs, forums, job boards and websites like Glassdoor for example) to find, attract and hire talent.