Social Recruiting Surprise: Google Beats Facebook, Twitter & LinkedIn (Combined) In Job Traffic

Rob Kelly
Latest posts by Rob Kelly (see all)

Ever wonder where all the traffic to your job postings comes from?

Ongig took a look at our last 100,000 visits to the “social job descriptions” we help power for our employer users (and thus have visibility into via analytics).

Given that Ongig specializes in “social job descriptions,” the results surprised us!

First, a couple of non-surprises:

Ongig.com — The largest source is “direct” traffic to our own site, Ongig, which is no big surprise (the top source of traffic for most Web sites is from internal links of its own site).

Employer Career Page — The second largest source of traffic is our own employers’ careers page. Again, no surprise here: many of these employers show a thumbnail embed of their job description on their own Web site (such as the one salesforce.com has pointing to Ongig below) or link to their jobs that are listed on Ongig.

The surprise came next.

Google Beats Facebook and Twitter

Google is the next largest source of traffic to job descriptions — and (at 17%) it beats Facebook, Twitter & LinkedIn combined (which totaled 14%).

Note: The vast majority of the Google traffic is from Google Search (not Google+). 

Despite the massive traffic of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, job candidates still appear to rely on Google when searching/evaluating job opportunities. Check out the types of job searches candidates made that resulted in them landing on a job description:

  • New Company Searches — e.g. “gokrt” and “hirevue”
  • Title Specific Searches — e.g. “customer centric engineering salesforce”
  • Team-Specific Searches — e.g. “Aparna Ramani” or “Angela Meyer Zaarly” or “Phil Cullen Calypso” or “twitter tnternationalization team”
  • Interview Phase Searches — e.g. “klout full-time interview” or “memsql interview questions”
  • Compensation Searches — e.g. “travel account executive groupon salary” or “commission zerocater”

Our guess is that Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn will have higher percentages of traffic when we look at this data again in a year or so.

But Facebook & LinkedIn Beat Google In Candidate Engagement

While Google still dominates job description traffic, there were some nice wins for social media in terms of candidate engagement. In particular, check out the average time spent by a candidate on each job description based on traffic source:
  • Facebook: 5:15
  • LinkedIn: 4:53
  • Google: 4:06
  • Twitter: 3:19

Why would candidates coming from Facebook and LinkedIn spend more time than candidates searching Google. We don’t know.

At this point, we don’t have enough visibility into Facebook and LinkedIn analytics to understand the data part.

However, one guess based on common sense is that candidates who find out about a job through Facebook and LinkedIn are closer to the hiring team than candidates searching Google.

Such candidates from social media might be an extension of the valuable employee referral candidates that employers prize so much they pay employees hundreds and thousands of dollars per as a reward.

If you’ve got any opinions of your own or data to share, please comment below.

*For more SEO recruiting tips, check out this comprehensive list of free best practices on recruitment SEO.

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