Social media is here to stay in recruitment. Get it right and the benefits will please and astound even the biggest skeptics. From attracting new and better candidates to engaging clients, a successful Twitter account really does make a difference.

Skype is an essential part of any recruiter’s toolset – and it’s free to use. It’s a dead easy way of screening or interviewing candidates who you may not otherwise have been able to meet.

Facebook has over a billion users. That’s a lot of potential candidates - and you can bet that a huge number of them aren’t on LinkedIn. Why not get their attention on Facebook? Posting an ad for your recruitment agency is easier (and cheaper) than you think!

A big part of your job as a recruiter is negotiating. It can be hard work sometimes, we know! Here are 10 negotiation tips to help you get a better deal, for yourself and others:

The angel investment market remains stable. This is really good news, especially for those who want to know how to get start-up funding to raise the capital they need to start a business.

A couple of years ago, we spent New Year’s Eve in Thornton Park, at the end of Balmain, with a great view of the Harbour Bridge. ... There were about 100 people there, one of whom was a talker. He was floating around, talking to people, most of whom were doing their best to pretend he wasn’t there. He sat on a bench about 10 feet from me, and identified me as his next victim.

Interviews are the supreme gateway for talent to enter a business and they’re the most popular form of candidate assessment going. But, ironically, academic evidence suggests that interviews are only mildly effective at predicting a candidate's future success in the job. One particular study by Schmidt and Hunter revealed that interviews may only predict about 14% of the variability of employee performance. It is especially worrying that interviews have such low levels of reliability, given how much they are actually used to assess top talent.

Are you sick of doing searches over and over again? It’s one of the most time-consuming, frustrating, and ultimately expensive experiences a recruiter can have. If it’s an experience you know well, it’s time to look at your interview to hire ratio (or, if you’re not tracking it yet, now’s the time to begin!).

If your ratio is more than 4:1, stop. Something has gone wrong. Until you address it you’re going to be caught in an endless search for more candidates, only to have them rejected. Before you present any more candidates, get to the bottom of the issue.

Here are four common areas that could be affecting your interview to hire ratio:

There’s an interesting and extensive discussion going on over on Linkedin about whether or not it’s a good idea for recruiters to format candidate CVs. We all know that admin is the worst part of a recruiters job, however it does make a difference to go that extra mile for your hiring managers.

It’s all well and good outlining notes and tips for how the candidate could reformat the CV themselves, then sending it to them, waiting for them to carry out the task, receiving and checking what they’ve rewritten... but this all takes time. So how do you strike that balance between getting the CV ready to present to the hiring manager and doing the work for the candidate which could lead to misrepresentation?

Facebook is undoubtedly the biggest social media website out there. It currently has over a billion users - that’s an absolute wealth of potential candidates. Therefore it’s essential that as a recruiter you use the site as well as possible. But how exactly do you do that? After you're up and running on Facebook, what do you even write about?