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Staff spending all day on Facebook? Twitter driving you dilly? Social networking tools may not be the timewasters you think they are.

The traditional job board business model is outdated, making it unable to compete with the innovation and cost savings of search engines and social media. Employers that are exclusively focusing on job boards for recruitment will come up short in the war for talent as generalised job boards are losing their effectiveness.

Mark Gray, head of online recruitment specialists, Graylink says Twitter is the latest buzz on the hiring scene as employers are turning to social networking platforms to supplement their traditional methods of searching for talent.

Social networking sites are the new recruitment platform.

Professional recruiters have started using social networking platforms such as Facebook, Orkut, MySpace and Linkedin, to hunt for candidates. These sites are also helping job hunters market themselves online by providing potential employers with access to profiles, work history and specific skills lists.

Perception in the business world is crucial to landing a job or even earning a promotion. It’s important that you build a professional persona that assures your peers that you’re more than capable of fulfilling the tasks required.

Has the corporate world hopped onto the social networking bandwagon? And more importantly, why should it?

Social networking is relevant as more than just a tool to interact with customers, however. Says Graylink head Mark Gray: “Social networking offers faster, cheaper and more effective communication, networking and collaboration, especially when it comes to recruitment. Compared with the cost of newspaper recruitment classifieds, social networking sites are much cheaper to push out information about a company.

Easily segmentable groups of very active audiences on these sites make it easier to reach the right people than the untargeted approach of newspaper advertising. Additionally, the neutral environment social networks provide to share information makes it much easier for companies to start conversations with top candidates, as they don’t feel they’re being sold to.”

Communicating with retrenched staff – graylink feature article on Bizcommunity.co.za

The Labour Relations Act requires employers to give retrenched staff members the first option to apply for new positions opening up at the company. And the same software used for recruitment can also help companies simplify staff’s re-employment and redeployment as part of the retrenchment process, it was announced earlier this week.

A new survey from Jobvite, a provider of next-generation recruitment solutions, shows what many experts may have already predicted: that companies are choosing to invest more money and time in social networks and employee referrals over job boards and search firms.

South African auditing firm BDO Spencer Steward has tapped into social networking with a Facebook campaign that is helping it recruit graduate students faster and more cost-effectively.