Do you focus your social media recruiting on LinkedIn? Or do you prefer to use all social media avenues? Perhaps you're avoiding social media for hiring or recruiting purposes altogether?

According to a recent study, social media can save you a lot of money when it comes to recruiting. The cost per hire using social media is $377, while traditional methods can run as high as $3,295 per hire. Plus, social media resources such as LinkedIn – which is specifically designed for business use – can quickly help you find the perfect hire. Effectively incorporating this interactive technology into your recruitment efforts can be a win-win situation for both your new hires and your organization.

In a BLR webinar titled "Online Recruiting: How LinkedIn Can Help You Find Talent, Network, and Build a Digital Referral Base," Linda Duffy outlined ways to meet recruiting challenges using LinkedIn.

From SHRM’s April 2011 Research Spotlight: Social Networking Sites and Staffing, they found that more than one-half (56 percent) of the organizations currently use social networking websites when recruiting potential job candidates. This is a significant increase since 2008, when a little over one-third (34 percent) of organizations were using these sites as a recruiting tool. Duffy confirmed: "I believe if you fast-forward another 3 years, it will be virtually 100 percent because I think this is the trend and the direction we're going."

Out of the 56 percent of the companies that are using social networking websites for recruiting, virtually all of them (95 percent) are using LinkedIn.

Why Should You Be Recruiting on LinkedIn?

LinkedIn may be your very best resource for making the connections that lead to qualified candidates and, ultimately, job offers. Social media in general has many recruiting benefits. Here are five reasons why social media – and LinkedIn in particular – is great for staffing and recruiting:

1. It's in real time. Candidates can set up alerts to be notified of new job postings and also can receive emails, texts, posts, and access websites on their phones. No more waiting on the news cycle to post a new classified advertisement. Normal business hours don't have to apply.
2. You can build a pipeline: have candidates come to you! This is one of the unique things about using social media for recruitment. It's a two-way communication. LinkedIn also has groups users can join that allow them to see job postings immediately.
3. It's viral (and that's a good thing). LinkedIn demonstrates this as well as any site--we are no longer communicating one on one; it’s one to many. This is the power of the networking aspect of the site in which something you post can reach not only those who you are connected with, but potentially those they are connected with as well. Additionally, a person can forward or share content and connections and even post a comment on multiple sites at the same time.
4. It's virtually free. Yes, you'll have sunk costs if you want something fancy or highly integrated . . . and you'll also have labor to monitor and post your ad, but the use of the site itself is free. If you post within a group on LinkedIn, there is no cost, but even if you post on their job section directly, it is only $195. Compare that to using offline agencies.
5. LinkedIn demographics tend to skew more professional than other social media sites. While they have fewer users (120 million) than some other social media sites, 70 percent are in the "workforce age population" of between 25 and 54 years of age. LinkedIn users tend to be more affluent and educated compared to Twitter and Facebook.

This makes LinkedIn critical for recruiting professional candidates; it's a great choice for meeting your staffing and recruiting needs.

The above information is excerpted in part from a BLR webinar titled "Online Recruiting: How LinkedIn Can Help You Find Talent, Network, and Build a Digital Referral Base" with expert Linda Duffy. For more information about recruiting on LinkedIn, order the webinar recording. To register for a future webinar, visit http://catalog.blr.com/audio.

Linda Duffy is President of Leadership Habitude. (www.leadershiphabitude.com) She works with business owners and executives to provide strategic human resources direction, develop leadership talent, and increase organizational effectiveness.