Social recruiting software helps you advertise roles and reach candidates through social platforms, and the honest way to judge it is narrow: it should either bring you more applicants or better-targeted ones, and those are different outcomes with different values. More applicants at the same quality does not help a desk that is already sifting 300 to make six hires; it makes the sift longer. Better-targeted applicants raise the first conversion ratio, which on the worked example is 20% of applicants worth a screen, and that ratio is the one that multiplies through everything after it. If social sourcing takes it from 20% to 30%, the applicants needed per hire falls from 50 to about 33, which is a third less sifting for the same six hires. That is a real and measurable benefit, and it is the number to ask a vendor about rather than reach or impressions. This page sets out what to measure before and after, and what the tooling can and cannot influence.
The ratio that matters is the first one
Applicants to screens. Reach and impressions are inputs to it, not substitutes for it, and a channel that doubles applicants while halving the ratio has left you exactly where you were with more reading to do and a larger advertising bill.
Measure by source or you are guessing
Every applicant needs a source recorded at the point of application. Without that field you cannot compare social against job boards against referrals, and the whole question becomes a matter of impression and whoever advocates loudest.
What the software cannot fix
How the role is described and what the pay range says do more to the first ratio than the channel does. If the advert is the problem, better distribution of the same advert simply distributes the problem more efficiently and costs more doing it.
Questions people ask about social recruiting software
Does social recruiting work for small employers?
It can, particularly for roles where the audience is genuinely on a platform. The way to know is your own source-level conversion, which needs the source recorded and a quarter of data.
Is it cheaper than job boards?
Sometimes in cost per applicant and not always in cost per hire, which is the figure that matters. The cost per hire sheet on this site works the second one.
Should I post roles manually instead?
At low volume that is often perfectly reasonable, and this is a vendor's site saying so. The software earns its place when the posting is repetitive enough that the hours are real.