Statistics and data points are a double-edged sword.

On one hand, they are necessary for measuring success, effective decision making, and convincing whoever is in charge to sign off on your projects.

On the other hand, they are often misleading, difficult to interpret, and hard to track down.

When hiring, employers, HR, and recruiters must look at the relevant statistics in order to make decisions about what their strategy should entail. Thankfully, they can also draw on personal experience and their gut instincts to assess how the available data is used.

But, when it comes to social recruiting, you may not have a lot of practical knowledge to draw from. And your gut may have a tendency to fall victim to the hype machine… Or worse, fear of change!

So, here are a few places we recommend for finding stats on social media, as well as some examples of the kind of data they have on offer:

Barclay Jones

The Barclay Jones blog shares a wealth of data and statistics about hiring and social recruiting. Their data is well curated, and comes from varied and well-respected sources.

Social Recruiter Guide

The Social Recruiter Guide website offers a new(ish) blog that covers all things social recruiting. Including downloadable How-to-Guides that are a great source of pertinent info, and smart advice for pros, intermediates, and beginners.

Software Advice – Industry Review Best Job Boards

The Software Advice site offers comparative data about different software. They recently did a comparison analysis of top job boards including LinkedIn.

The study is definitely worth checking out. Here’s an example graph:

Inside Facebook

Inside Facebook provides tons of great information about Facebook, as well as many other social networks. Inside Facebook, is a favorite of mine, because along with the positive stuff, they do not hesitate to publish critical articles and unflattering stats about FB, or social media gurus.

Here’s an excerpt from one of my favorite posts: Why you may be learning the wrong lessons from Facebook marketing gurus.

“Here’s the untold truth of social media – you can use it to generate sales, lightning fast. And the good news is that it doesn’t matter even if you’re selling seemingly ‘boring’ products.”

This article is a response to the idea that you have to be outside of the box, and pull crazy stunts, in order to be successful with social media.

Jon Loomer

Jon is smart, researches everything he posts about, and performs multiple experiments to back his theories.

His research is excellent!

Check out his post: How to target Facebook users by behavior like purchases, car owned, charitable donations and more… 

Want more?  Follow the Jobcast team on Twitter. We always try to tweet as many great studies and articles as possible about social recruiting.