In this whitepaper, you will learn: - How the right sharing tools increase recruiter productivity - How to scale a recruiting strategy to attract candidates - How sharing jobs on social networks can augment employer branding efforts - Why social networks bring in quality employee referrals

1. May 2013
The Science of Social Job Sharing:
How to Effortlessly Tap Your Social Network for
Employee Referrals and Passive Candidates
SJS

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ABSTRACT
Certain laws are immutable: what goes up, must come down. Matter cannot be
created or destroyed. You shouldn’t wear white after Labor Day.*
*Although this one’s arguable, depending upon whom you ask.
Or how about this one? Recruiting is an inherently social activity.
You don’t have to sit under a tree and wait to get bonked on the head by an apple
to come to the same conclusion we did: Recruiting is social. Social media is social.
Why not put two and two together?
There is, of course, a science to sourcing and hiring the right candidates on social
media. If you have the right tools, you can gain some velocity with your social
recruiting strategy, and even increase your qualified candidates to a critical mass.

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CONTENTS
COPYRIGHT
© 2013 Work4 Labs, Inc.
All rights reserved.
The Science of Social Job Sharing:
How to effortlessly tap your social network for employee
referrals and passive candidates
Hypothesis
Variable 1: Trust and Relevance
Variable 2: Scale and Reach
Procedure
Results
Conclusion
Sources
About
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11

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HYPOTHESIS You don’t need a peer-reviewed scientific study
to know that social media can be great for
recruiting—but how can you best leverage it to
source the highest quality candidates?
Glad you asked. Here’s why sharing jobs over your
employees’ networks helps you source the best
candidates for your open jobs:
Gain trust
Increase relevance
Scale your recruiting message
And here’s what social media does for your
recruiting team (and your employee accomplices!):
Increase recruiter productivity
Increase passive candidates and higher
quality active candidates
Reduce barriers to employee sharing
So let’s break it down:

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Variable 1:
Trust and
Relevance
When it comes to word of mouth (or tweet
or share of mouth, such as the case may be),
people tend to trust those closest to them
first and foremost. They call a share from
someone you trust “earned media,” because
the person who is sharing has already earned
your trust. In fact, 92% of people are likely to
trust a recommendation from a friend or family
member online!1
Companies and employers can share “earned
media” too, but it does take a little bit of
work to do the “earning.” Not only do you
need to be actively posting content on your
social channels, but also responding to your
fans and followers, cultivating relationships
with your talent community, and seeking to
build new relationships by placing ads and
encouraging your followers to share.
If a qualified candidate happens to be scrolling
through his Facebook Newsfeed and notices that
one of your employees (his friend) has posted
a job, he may be likely to click to learn more.
After all, it’s a job at a company that his friend
not only knows about but can also vouch for as
an employee. His friend wouldn’t be helping find
new talent for a company that his friend didn’t
like. And if he has any questions about the job,
the culture, or the company itself, he has a direct,
trustworthy reference that is only a wall post or
direct message away.
It’s also more likely that jobs posted by
employees will be relevant to their friends.
Your employees aren’t likely to share jobs in
strange, exotic locations (unless they really
want to help their friends live their dreams of
moving to Bermuda--and if you know anyone
sharing jobs in Bermuda, can you please forward
the application?), and they are more likely to
share jobs that resonate with people who have
similar skill sets, educational backgrounds, work
histories, or interests as they do.
Relevance is key because it will increase the
likelihood that people will click to learn more and
even apply.
92%
likely to trust a recommendation
from friends/family online

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Social Media
Passive Talent Pool
Variable 2:
scale and
reach
Employee referrals are a great way to organically
boost recruiter productivity, not least because
they save recruiters some of the time it takes
to go out to search for talent. As we’ve seen,
referred candidates are a small, selective group
of candidates that come with recommendations--
much more reliable than random candidates who
are simply submitting applications because “it’s a
job” and they need one.
But recruiters still spend much of their time
sourcing. Employee referrals only make up a
small percentage of overall applicants, and
sometimes a small, selective group of candidates
won’t help you fill all of your open positions.
So how do you scale your sourcing without
sacrificing the quality of your candidates?
The key is finding a source of passive candidates.
While many active candidates are very qualified
and even potentially a good fit for your company,
the fact of the matter is that many are not. Even
with innovations in talent management systems,
you still don’t want to spend time and energy
sorting through resumes.
Just as with employee referrals, so can passive
candidates help you find more fittng and better
qualified new recruits. 84% of the population
is considered to be “passive,” i.e. not actively
looking for a new job.2
Yet 76% of people who are
not actively looking to change jobs will consider
taking the right job if the opportunity comes
along.3
That means that passive candidates are
a great opportunity for companies to bring in
people who want your job, not a job.
Social media makes finding passive candidates
easier. If your company is already connecting with
fans, you have a built in talent pool whose eyes
are on your updates (and your jobs).
71% of companies say they’re already using social
media to find passive candidates,4
but even then,
there’s still a hands-on component that must be
overcome. Hunting for the best of the best among
your connections in your extended networks can
still be a fairly time-consuming process.
If you want to leverage and scale the trust
and relevance that comes from recruiters and
employees sharing with connections, then you
need a way to automate the process.

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Procedure The beauty of social media is that you already
have the basic tools (an email address, internet)
and the audience (start with friends and build
a following) just a few keystrokes away. As long
as you have a username, you have access to
hundreds of thousands (if not millions and
billions, you influential person, you!) of friends,
fans, followers, and connections.
You have to wonder why, with so many of our
other HR activities now automated (through
talent management systems and the like), it has
taken so long to automate this highly valued
process. You can easily increase recruiter
productivity (in addition to candidate flow) by
automating job sharing across social networks.
That means not only giving employees the tools
to share jobs with their friends and recruiters
the tools to share jobs with their connections,
but also providing them a way to make it
happen automatically. The less work you can put
between your people and their connections, the
better off your social recruiting strategy will be.
By automating your job sharing, you remove the
barriers to having your employees recommend
jobs to their friends. With only a few clicks to
opt-in to the job-sharing tool (and maybe a few
more clicks to choose which types of jobs they
want to share and on which platforms), jobs are
scheduled, and employees don’t have to do any
more work. No time spent planning, coming up
with clever things to post, choosing photos....
just a couple of clicks and their networks are
connected. Ah, the beauty of automation...
You also remove some of the temporal
constraints on your recruiting team, since they
won’t have to spend time copying and pasting
jobs to share on various networks at optimal
times during the day. Automatic job sharing
means less time spent on sourcing active
candidates or headhunting passive ones.
Look at it this way: there are more than 67%
of online adults using social media,5
with an
average of 245 Facebook friends,6
634 people
in their combined Facebook, LinkedIn, and
Twitter networks,7
9000 2nd degree LinkedIn
connections,8
and roughly 31,000 people in
their extended Facebook network.9
That’s a lot
of potential connections who come to your jobs
from a place of trust and relevance. Not too
shabby!
Even if an individual recruiter’s personal
networks seem relatively small:
1. When connections see a job and share it,
the network is exponentially expanded.
2. Jobs can also be shared to a company’s
main Facebook page, which increases
the number of people who will see your
company’s recruiting message.

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results You also get the added benefit of bringing
your branded employer message to all of
the aforementioned people. Even if all 31,000
Facebook friends and 9000 LinkedIn connections
don’t apply for your jobs, there’s a huge
opportunity to at least expose them to your brand.
By generating these free “impressions” (or job
views) you’re saving your company money on
advertising while planting the seed for potential
job applicants and customers/clients down the
line. It’s a win-win!
Moreover, jobs shared are free content for your
company’s Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter
accounts, so all of the people who enjoy following
you are consistently shown (again) relevant
and engaging posts coming from each of your
accounts. Content creation and management is
another time- and effort-expensive process, and
you can maximize your engagement with your
followers by providing a steady stream of content
for them to “like,” comment on, and share with
their friends.

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Conclusions Ultimately, sharing jobs socially affects your
company’s overall investment of time, money,
and effort spent bringing in the most qualified
candidates through social media. Social recruiting
can seem like a daunting task, but you don’t
need a team of scientists (or social-media-savvy
teenagers) to teach you how to tweet like a pro.
With tools like Work4’s Social Job Sharing, which
makes everyone a recruiter and everyone a
candidate, you can plan your social recruiting
success in advance by automatically sharing jobs
over recruiter and employee networks.
Great results with social recruiting are only a few
clicks of a button away--and that’s no theory!
There are already many companies, including
many members of the Fortune 500, who have
discovered the power of Social Job Sharing.
Ready to try your own social recruiting experiment?
Contact the social recruiting Einsteins at Work4, and
start Social Job Sharing today!
Make social job sharing
your next great idea!

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SOURCES
1. http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/newswire/2012/consumer-trust-in-online-social-
and-mobile-advertising-grows.html
2. http://www.hrmreport.com/article/Passive-Candidate-Strategies-Winning-the-
War-for-Talent/
3. http://www.careerbuilder.com/share/aboutus/pressreleasesdetail.aspx?id=pr61
3&sd=1/6/2011&ed=12/31/2011
4. http://www.shrm.org/Research/SurveyFindings/Articles/Pages/SHRM-Social-
Networking-Websites-Recruiting-Job-Candidates.aspx
5. http://pewinternet.org/Commentary/2012/March/Pew-Internet-Social-
Networking-full-detail.aspx
6. http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/Facebook-users/Summary/Friends-
of-Friends.aspx
7. http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2011/Technology-and-social-networks/
Part-3/SNS-users.aspx
8. http://blog.linkedin.com/2012/03/14/startup-of-you-data/
9. http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/Facebook-users/Summary/Friends-
of-Friends.aspx

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FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
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ABOUT
WORK4™
Work4 powers social recruiting by making everyone a recruiter and everyone a candidate.
We help thousands of companies, including many of the Fortune 500, find, engage,
and hire top talent with our all-in-one recruiting solution for Facebook. Work4 allows
employers to reach candidates through a Facebook Career Site and on mobile devices,
take advantage social networks to drive employee referrals, and target Facebook’s 1
billion users with intelligent recruiting ads. Work4 brings cost-effective, efficient sourcing
and hiring to the world’s top companies by leveraging the reach and scope of the world’s
largest and most powerful social network.
Established in 2010 and backed by top tier investors such as Matrix Partners and Yuri
Milner, Work4 has offices in San Francisco and Paris.
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