Kolkata: Social media, which connects friends, has become a professional networking place, which can be leveraged to find and be found by prospective employers.

Kolkata-based Genius Consultants which conducted a survey on the hiring scenario of the current fiscal 2014-15, reveals that 55 per cent of the 575 companies surveyed among different sectors said new jobs will be created in the current fiscal.

“Social networking sites are being used more for enhancing career opportunities than anything else. For candidates sourcing avenues, around 11 per cent would be done from social media and 12 per cent form advertising,” said Genius Consultants CMD RP Yadav, a Rs 450 crore company, on the sidelines of releasing ‘Hiring & Attrition Trend Survey 2014-15 in Kolkata on Thursday.

Around 50 per cent of the users, at present, create an account on platforms like Facebook, Orkut, Twitter and YouTube with professional motives, he added. Social media, especially LinkedIn, plays a major role in mid-level jobs.

Experts said around 75 per cent of LinkedIn users are graduates and postgraduates, with 15 per cent belonging to senior management levels. LinkedIn charges companies to search profiles and to place recruitment advertisements. Apart from being a means to headhunting, it gives recruiters visibility as users visit LinkedIn very often.

By way of tracking candidates through the social media, recruiters can unify all the resumes in their database and standardise hiring processes.

Online job sites, which ate into the share of newspapers in the last decade, now have to face up to social media, added Yadav.

Talking about the media industry, he said that though the industry is growing, in the long term small media companies would be phased out.

For the survey, the consultancy firm sent mailers to 3000 companies, out of which 824 companies participated and around 575 companies answered all the questions.

Yadav further said organizations plan to give increments to their employees in 2014-15. Around 40 per cent companies said that the range of increments will be between 10 to15 per cent, while 33 per cent companies expect it to be in between 5 to 10 per cent range. 

On the other hand 13 per cent companies expected it to be in between 15 to 20 per cent and 10 per cent companies expected the increments to be less than 5 per cent.