Gaming company bets on social media for recruitment

In an effort to boost its profile and visibility among job candidates, gaming company Penn National Gaming is betting on a new recruiting strategy designed to actively promote job listings on social media sites.

The company, which owns and operates gaming and racing facilities across North America, has chosen to supplement its current recruitment and onboarding platforms with a new focus on social media.

“With social distribution, we’re pushing the jobs out – making those jobs go viral,” says Tamsin Bencivengo, manager of talent acquisition at Penn National Gaming. “We’re attracting attention to our position, to our company, who we are, and we’re able to use it on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, or whatever social platform we happen to be on.”

In addition to the “likes” on its Facebook pages “going through the roof,” Bencivengo explains that, based on conversations she’s had with HR and executive leadership at the organization, the quality of the talent pool has increased since implementing a social media component to its recruiting strategy. The company currently has almost 17,000 employees.

“The neat thing about the Internet and going social is that you’re not just reaching one person and it stops. It keeps going,” Bencivengo notes. “So this is a way for us to continuing reaching people that would have otherwise been able to reach.”

Also See: Dangers of social media recruitment: Why recruitment managers could be at risk

Penn National Gaming used iCIMS, a cloud-based talent acquisition company, to help with its recruiting needs. “Some companies are very progressive about [social media] – they are all about it – and others are more conservative about the use of social,” says Susan Vitale, iCIMS chief marketing officer.

Data from Staff.com reveals about 92% of companies use social media for recruitment, with LinkedIn (93%) ranking No. 1 and Facebook (66%) and Twitter (54%) following behind. Forty-two percent of companies, meanwhile, say that candidate quality has increased.

According to iCIMS' own analysis of over 60,000 jobs posted on social media in 2013, 51% of recruiters are posting jobs to Twitter, while only 1% of job candidates are searching tweets for job leads. LinkedIn seemed to be where candidates expect to find jobs, but social media users were spending the most time in viewing a job on Google+ and were more likely to apply on Facebook.

“I think a lot of the assumptions made about what social networks should be used best for what positions weren’t really the case,” says Vitale. “It shows there is more opportunity on a site like Facebook than people may have expected.”

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