Ignore that request from LinkedIn or Twitter at your peril — it might be a job offer, according to a global study released Wednesday.
The study, commissioned by U.S. human resources firm Kelly Services, found that 39% of Canadians polled have been contacted through a social media website or network in the last year about a possible job opportunity.
Of those surveyed, 14% of Canadians said they were hired after having been contacted via websites like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.
A majority (60%) agreed that these networks were a good way for them to forward along job opportunities to friends and colleagues and about half (48%) said they would be interested in receiving such offers.
The survey, which polled 122,000 people from around the world, found that, on average, 41% said they were contacted in the last year about a job through social media. Brazil was the highest at 74%, while the figure for the United States matched Canada at 39%
The annual online survey was conducted from October 2012 to January 2013 and polled 7,513 people in Canada. The polling industry's professional body, the Marketing Research and Intelligence Association, says online surveys cannot be assigned a margin of error because they do not randomly sample the population.
