Don’t ask why you should be on social media for recruitment, ask why you shouldn’t be. Although these words were said by one speaker, this seemed to sum up the essence of the Social Recruiting Conference 2010, held in London last week.

The speaker, Ted Meulenkamp, global program manager recruitment strategies at pharmaceutical firm Roche, told the audience that when he joined Roche back in April the company had very little social media presence. “Our RocheJobs Twitter site and our Facebook page were getting hardly any ’fans’,” he said.

So why would this pose any problems to recruitment? If the group of candidates you were trying to attract were mainly Gen Y graduates, then this could be disastrous. Sedef Buyukataman, university relations manager for Cisco EMEA, explained: “Gen Y prefer social networking sites [in their communications]; they rarely use email. In fact, some universities have given up sending emails to their students.”

Letting them know about jobs, then, was going to be difficult. The global technology firm had to modify its approach to speak to graduates and found that Facebook, with its 500m plus users and growing every day, was the best channel.

The speakers emphasised that in creating a company careers page on Facebook - or any social networking site - interaction was key and the aim was to find methods to engage with the audience. “Silence is deadly in social recruiting,” Meulenkamp told the audience.

However, Buyukataman cautioned that Gen Y in particular “don’t like to be advertised to”. Cisco’s Facebook site is about communication, content and community around shared interests, not ad-driven she said.

Since starting on the social recruiting campaign, Roche is already seeing results. The Roche careers Facebook site was getting around 50 ’likes’ before the revamp, Meulenkamp said. At the end of 2010, that figure had shot up to around 1,300.