By the way! If you're into social recruiting, you totally need to register for next week's Social Recruiting Summit in New York City, held by ere.net.

So. You're a recruiter with a limited budget. How do you demonstrate to the higher-ups that you should be spending it on Facebook, not on CareerBuilder?

John Sullivan at ERE.net compiled a list of the benefits of social recruiting, as well as a step-by-step tutorial of how to to try on your boss.

We're not going to run through the whole set of instructions here as there are quite a lot of them.

But here are some of the "highly compelling" benefits of social media recruiting:

* Hire quality — the program may result in hires who perform better on the job and have higher retention rates.
* Candidate quality — those who frequently use social networks may be the highly desirable early adopter; this source may identify higher-quality candidates who can then be presented to hiring managers (including those who are more technically savvy and more innovative). Note: even the simple act of listing the primary source (that generated the resume) on the top corner of every resume will, over time, educate hiring managers and eventually lead them to demand that recruiting shift their emphasis toward the sources that appear most frequently on top of the resumes that end up on a hiring manager's short list.
* ROI — the dollar value of the program's benefits may far exceed its cost, and the resulting ROI may be significantly higher than other recruiting programs.
* Vacancy days — because of the high usage rates and the short response times on some social network communications channels, revenue-generating, and key positions may be filled faster, resulting in fewer costly vacancy days in key positions.
* Higher offer acceptance rates — using social networks to attract and communicate with candidates may result in higher offer acceptance rates among finalists.
* Hidden candidates — it may identify qualified candidates who cannot be found or successfully messaged using other sources.

For "often compelling" benefits, click the jump.

* Employer brand — using social networks may increase your visibility and may significantly improve your "we get it" leading-edge employer brand image among targeted prospects (even if the image-building it doesn't result in immediate applications).

* College impact — because of the high social network usage rates among college students, it may directly impact the number and the quality of college hire and entry-level candidates.

* Communications responsiveness — because there is less spam and in most cases you must be invited before you can send a message, using social networks to communicate may result in higher response rates and/or in more immediate responses when you send messages to prospects and candidates.

* Message impact — messages sent over social media channels may be perceived by the receiver as being more authentic or have a higher level of credibility and believability than traditional corporate mechanisms. The relatively low cost of sending messages over social networks may also allow your firm to increase the number of messages that it can afford to send. Together, these two factors may result in more effective messages that directly increase applications.

* Job visibility — using social networking sources may ensure that your job openings will be seen and read by a larger number of qualified candidates.

* Candidate diversity — it may provide your firm with a higher percentage of qualified diverse candidates in managerial and professional jobs.

* Global candidates — it may provide your firm with a high number of qualified candidates who reside outside of your headquarter's country.

* Cross-fertilization — the methods, tools, and approaches that are developed using social networks for recruiting may be directly transferred to other business functions like marketing, customer service, product development, etc. So these functions may find that their social networking results will be directly and measurably improved as a result of the collaboration.

And there are even more benefits at the original article.