Economics in Brief

More and more businesses now use social media – even to recruit workers. At present, some 40% of small and medium-sized enterprises in Germany hire workers using social media, and the European average is as high as 46%. This was revealed by the European SME Survey, for which KfW Research interviewed more than 2,500 businesses in Germany, France, Poland, Spain and the United Kingdom jointly with other European promotional banks.

Businesses that are heavily affected by the skills shortage in particular turn to social media. Another reason these channels are becoming increasingly important in recruiting skills is that more age cohorts who have grown up with digital media are entering the workforce. The coronavirus crisis has provided further impetus to the use of social media and is likely to boost their use in the SME sector in the medium term as well.

Social media – a tool for SMEs to recruit talent(PDF, 94 KB, non-accessible)

Press release