Recruiters should avoid simply following the crowd by using social media channels, recruiters have heard.

Peter Gold, founder of social media consultancy Hire Strategies, told the Social Media in Recruitment conference in London yesterday: “You need to know where your existing traffic is coming from. Don’t add a lot of new channels until you know what you are doing now.”

He said that one client who had been using job boards wanted to go down the road of using social media even though they already had several hundred unprocessed CVs in their system.   

Gold said that rather than publishing additional jobs on social media such as Facebook and Twitter, he had advised the client to stop advertising. 

He said it was important for recruiters “to get the basics right first” by measuring where their existing traffic was coming from. Google Analytics, linked to their website, was a good starting point, he suggested.