• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, September 5, 2013

Recruiters and corporate headhunters love social media, and not just because of the funny cat pictures. The reason is simple enough: They can use social media to make more money.

That’s according to a recent survey of 1,600 recruiters and human resources professional by Jobvite, which found that 94% of recruiters surveyed said they are using social media professionally, and 78% have made a hire via social media. And while 43% of recruiters are spending less than $1,000 a month on social media recruiting, 60% said that the value of the hires made via social media is over $20,000 a year -- and one in five said the hires made via social media were worth over $90,000 a year. While it’s not clear how much these percentages overlap, it seems clear that social media delivers a lot of recruiting bang for minimal bucks.

In terms of recruiter preferences, LinkedIn is obviously the go-to network for prospects, with 92% of recruiters who hired someone via social media doing so via LinkedIn. Meanwhile 24% said they have hired someone via Facebook, and 14% via Twitter.

Predictably, the Jobvite survey turned up some more ominous trends in social media recruitment, including people losing job opportunities because of ill-advised posts. Thus 47% of recruiters said they reacted negatively to photos showing a job candidate consuming alcohol; 51% to references to guns; 61% to spelling and grammatical errors; 65% to profanity; 71% to sexual posts; and 83% to posts suggesting an individual used illegal drugs.