Introduction to Social Media Recruitment
Social media technologies are a combination of applications and websites that enable its users to create innovative and meaningful content that can be shared on these platforms with other users. This process of creating content and sharing it is usually referred to as Social Media Networking (Lenhart, et al., 2015). These contents and information can take many forms such as blogs, news forums, business networks, products and services reviews, micro blogs, photo and video sharing.
Each and every social media platform is different from one another and all their functions vary from one platform to another. There are multiple platform available in the market. This is how they differ from one another. With competition on the rise it is very tough for the employers to choose and recruit the desired potential candidates and employees for their companies (Della and Mattoni, 2015). The typical recruitment process of sourcing and hiring employees through numerous job portal and other recruitment tools can be very time consuming and costly. Here social media networking platforms come to their rescue and plays an important role when it comes to recruiting the best of candidates.
Social Networking: As the name suggests, networking refers to those websites and applications that help connect its users to communicate formally or informally with their friends, families and other people directly through groups and networks from any desired location from around the world. Example- Face book, Google+, LinkedIn Micro blogging: Micro blogging refers to those particular social networking sites where users can post minimalistic piece of information, news or updates of any kind for other people to see and reply with direct messages publicly. On this platform, users can subscribe to view other users’ content to review, share and even create new and meaningful content using hash tags. Example is Twitter & Tumbler (Trainor, et al.,2014).
Blogging: Blogging websites are usually personal websites where users can create and share real stories, educational information, world news, learning and informative articles and also share links of other related websites. Example, Word Press, Blogger
Photo Sharing: These social networking websites and applications enable its users to publish and their digital photos with other users either publicly or privately on this digital forum. Example is Instagram, Flickr and Pinterest (Fulk and Connie Yuan, 2017)
Video Sharing: Video sharing websites and application allow its users to embed their media in the form of videos, music videos, movies and post them for public viewing on these platforms. Example is YouTube and Vimeo (Finch, et al., 2016).
Different Types of Social Media Platforms
Social media platforms have proven to be the greatest tool for recruitment purposes. With the growing popularity of social media platforms like Twitter, Face book and LinkedIn, a large number of human resource professionals and recruiters are utilizing these platforms for recruitment and advertising purposes. It is a great way of showcasing the brand value and image of the companies by directly communicating with the potential candidates and informing them about the ongoing vacancies. Social media tools can be used to access candidates’ skills, personal qualities along with their previous experience. The mission of using the social media tools is to provide employers with an effective employment network that is cost effective and can reach an ethnically diverse national and international workforce of active candidates. Social media networking is considered to be the worlds’ largest professional network with over 150 million members across 200 countries and territories combined. A recent study shows that through social media platforms over 1 million links are shared in every 20 seconds and 10-11 social media accounts are opened ever second.
Both active and passive job seekers usually use a company’s social media page to search and look for jobs posted. The growing availability of high speed internet access has added to the popularity of social media platforms where users can create web-based profiles and engage in conversations directly with the recruiters.
- Social media platforms have a larger pool of potential candidates and employees.
- Candidate experiences can be enhanced through direct communication.
- There is a huge access to hidden candidates.
- Job visibility increases through ease of sharing and networking
- The best of candidates can be filtered with the help of access to more information in lesser time.
- Advertising and other overhead costs can be saved by the employers.
- Databases of employees and candidates are more compared to the traditional recruitment process.
- Social Medias spread any news about jobs on digital social platforms like wild fire, informing more and more people and the response rate is much higher than the other traditional processes.
- Social Media can engage passive candidates and employees who rarely visit online job portals or other recruitment agencies.
- There is lot of employer transparency and employers can directly engage in conversations with potential customers, prominent suppliers, internal and external shareholders.
- There is easy access and direct possible networking with industry leaders.
- A wider range of passive audiences can be reached while engaging in conversations on various recruitment topics.
- Employees can be searched and found.
- Organisation scan be acknowledged through references( and Hastak, 2018)
- Employers can become a part of an online forum to share information and easily recruit.
- Employers can be biased towards candidates with good social media presence.
- Candidates may display inaccurate information.
- All people on social media do not want their profiles to be viewed by employers because they want to keep their information private.
- Information which is not permitted to be used in the hiring decision.
- Potential violations of state and federal laws related to background checks.
- Potential failure to hire or discriminate claim.
- Inconsistent usage.
Job seekers no longer follow the traditional ways of job searching. They simply create their digital profiles along with their resumes on numerous job portals to be viewed by end number of employers, which is not only hassle free but also time saving because the options are many (Cook, 2017). Example is Linkin.
Social media is known for its source of generating high quality referrals and hence the recruitment process through these platforms is easy, engaging and less time taking. With most of the enterprises going global most of the companies want to diminish their marginal as well as over-head costs when it comes to recruiting employees, by adopting a friendly approach to select candidates through virtual or video interviewing techniques (Gehl, 2014). Virtual interviewing is not just cost effective but also less time taking that in a way improves the quality of hire. Video interviews relieve the stress of the tradition hiring process as it allows the applicants to respond to the recruiters’ questions as per their convenience. A large number of candidates can easily be screened instead of the face-to-face interviews that are sometimes not as fruitful. The interview video can be kept for later use to compare and screen the best of the candidates at a later time. Pre-determined questions can be set for interviewing to main consistency (White, 2016). The reliability with which information can be obtained from websites and the validity of those information can and should be established.
Advantages of Social Media Recruitment
A recent survey shows that applicants’ profiles may enhance their chances of being hired or selected based on the supportive evidence of their listed experiences. Potential employees may have access to detailed information that would allow them to draw conclusions or make inferences about the characteristics and personality of the applicant that might not be obtained through the traditional ways of recruitment. Social networking sites can be seen as tools to screen out the profiles of job seekers in the selection processes and this could have a positive or negative effect on the job applicants depending on the content of a social networking profile. The use of social networking sites for recruiting seems to be vividly accepted because of its close relation to the advertising of the jobs.
Advantages of Video Interviewing are as follows:
- It speeds up the interview process
- The quality of hire is improved
- The best candidates can easily be identified.
- Candidates engagement with the respective organisation or brands can be improved
- The number of candidates who do not show up can be reduced.
- Time will not be wasted in interviewing the unsuitable candidates
- Time will not be wasted in scheduling interviews or meetings
- Answer of Candidates can be compared and reviewed at a later time.
- Geographical constrains are faced no more.
- Candidates can save on the travel cost.
Employees are the main pillars of any organisation and it cannot run without the proper functioning of its human resources (Obar and Wildman, 2015). Hence hiring the best employees is an important function that broadly involves two main activities:Hiring
The basic purpose of recruitment is to provide a range of potentially bright and qualifies candidates through extensive screening and comparing the prospective applicants (Munar and Jacobsen, 2014). Keeping in mind the present and the future requirements of the organisation, the success rate of the selection process of the candidates can be increased by reducing the number of less or under-qualified job applicants and job seekers (Ngai, Tao and Moon, 2015). Hence it is of utmost importance to identify and prepare the right applicants through certain screening and selection processes. This will help to increase the effectiveness and function ability of the applicants in the long run. With a wide range of applicants the selection process of the right candidates becomes quite competitive which increases the prospects of the best ones. Job dissatisfaction and fewer turnovers of employees could be a result of wrong selection of candidates if allocated in wrong positions (Agnihotri, et al.,2016). The effectiveness of the recruitment process can be enhanced once the applicants understand the needs of the organisation.
Most of the organisations these days use the following channels to hire employees during vacancies.
?Printed media
- Local employment offices
- Hire internally
- Temporary recruitment agencies
But all the above mentioned methods are age old methods of hiring through publishing that take a lot of time to receive responses from the applicants. But Social Media Recruiting has redefined these old methods and has transformed the way people communicate through networking while looking for candidates during vacancies (Westin. and Ruebhausen, 2015). Social media platforms can help advertise about job openings in a very less expensive and less time consuming manner because it has become one of the worlds’ most popular forums to inform and establish connections between people from anywhere in the world. The world of recruitment has identified the fundamental importance of utilizing social media and has begun to use social sites to look for top candidates (Wamba and Carter, 2016).
- Increased candidates in terms of quantity, quality and engagements
- Increased brand awareness
- Creates virility of job opportunity on social media platforms
- Decrease recruitment costs
- Decrease length of hire cycles and saves time
- Social media platforms enable prospective candidates to respond immediately through numerous platforms and hence the vacant positions can be filled fast without wasting much time that is usually required in the traditional hiring methods
Digital interviewing of candidates can not only lower recruitment costs but also reduces the time-to-hire rates.
Challenges of Social Media Recruitment
Conclusion
Social media sites have the distinct advantage of enabling companies to reinvent themselves not only internally but also externally as a means of identifying and sourcing the best talent through networking. One out of two companies post brand related content on social media to be viewed by millions at once. Social media users and consumers are very open to co-creation and structural collaboration with brands they happen to like on social media. The social media addiction is bound to rise in the future due to its accessibility and affordability and networking will be on a forever rise. New tools and websites are constantly being created and job creations are increasing by the minute. Thus social media technologies and platforms will open new horizons of opportunities for people all around the world in years to come and it’s very important to make good use of these technologies and make them work in favour of us.
References
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Cook, N., 2017. Enterprise 2.0: How social software will change the future of work. Routledge.
Della Porta, D. and Mattoni, A., 2015. Social movements. The International Encyclopedia of Political Communication, pp.1-8.
Finch, K.C., Snook, K.R., Duke, C.H., Fu, K.W., Tse, Z.T.H., Adhikari, A. and Fung, I.C.H., 2016. Public health implications of social media use during natural disasters, environmental disasters, and other environmental concerns. Natural Hazards, 83(1), pp.729-760.
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Trainor, K.J., Andzulis, J.M., Rapp, A. and Agnihotri, R., 2014. Social media technology usage and customer relationship performance: A capabilities-based examination of social CRM. Journal of Business Research, 67(6), pp.1201-1208.
Wamba, S.F. and Carter, L., 2016. Social media tools adoption and use by SMEs: An empirical study. In Social Media and Networking: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications(pp. 791-806). IGI Global.
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White, C.M., 2016. Social media, crisis communication, and emergency management: Leveraging Web 2.0 technologies. CRC press
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