NOTE:  If what you really want are just the stats about how Canadian recruiters are using social media, just scroll down - there's a handy bulleted list at the bottom.

While there are plenty of great things about living and working in Canada, there is one drawback:  The companies large enough to have offices in both the US and Canada tend to have their research and marketing functions headquartered in the US. 

This means that when they're determining budgets for market research, they often figure, "Oh, Canada is pretty much the 51st state anyway - we don't  have to do separate research in the Canadian marketplace.  We'll just extrapolate from the US data using the 10% rule of thumb."

I'll admit, while most Canadians are adamant in their position that Canada is very different from the US, we all know that there are plenty of similarities in the two markets, and using the old "10% rule" (i.e. if the US market for a given product is $100 million, it's generally safe to say that the Canadian market is $10 million) can often be reasonably accurate at a high level.  

(Though it should be noted that Canadian consumers do have very different tastes and habits than US consumers in some ways.  For example, Hershey's has long used a different chocolate formulation for Canadian tastebuds.)

However, between 9/11, the 8 years of Republican control, the Wall Street meltdown and the global growth in the internet and social media - not to mention Canada's social contract regarding things like gay marriage and healthcare - which are making the differences more apparent.

The internet and social media:  Canadians tend to be early adopters

Canadians, while slower to catch on to online shopping circa 2000-2001, were faster to adopt high-speed internet, and we continue to have higher per-capita internet use rates (about 83% of Canadians vs 69% of Americans).

As a result, Canadians have been early adopters of social media tools:  Toronto continues to be one of the most Facebooked cities in the world, and ranks #4 in the world for LinkedIn use.

Social media and Canadian recruiting

The upshot of this, of course, is that US statistics on the use of social media for recruiting aren't necessarily accurate for the Canadian market.  For example, MySpace never really addressed the Canadian marketplace in terms of job postings, so it was never a popular recruiting/candidate relationship management tool for Canadian recruiters.

Last week, Head2Head hosted, in partnership with LinkedIn, a webinar about "Leveraging LinkedIn For Recruiters" (it was so popular, we've scheduled another session on June 17 - we'd love you to join us).

Since 95% of participants were Canadian recruiters and hiring managers, we decided to ask them about their use of social media for recruiting.

Here's what they said:

• 69% of CDN recruiters use LinkedIn for recruiting
• 44% use Facebook
• 9% use Twitter
• 6% use blogs
• 3% use YouTube
• 3% use Craigslist
• 0% use Tumblr or MySpace
• Only 20% say social media delivers a clear ROI
• 77% say it’s improved their ability to connect to passive candidates
• 44% say it’s improved their quality of hire
• 36% say it’s reduced their time to hire
• 66% say no one oversees their social media stuff – it’s all rogue

So there you go:  Your Canadian-source primary data for the day.  Feel free to Twitter, write a blog post - whatever!