13-08-2014, 11:12 AM
USE OF SOCIAL MEDIA (LINKEDIN, FACEBOOK, TWITTER ETC.) AND IT’S EFFECTIVENESS. FOR AUSTRALIAN VOCATIONAL TRAINING AN EMPLOYMENT GROUP
[attachment=66597]
INTRODUCTION
Current challenges and changes in technology and the role of the Internet open up new opportunities for companies to communicate and work. The fact that Social Networking Sites entered the business landscape, and in particular the recruitment landscape leads to a demand for knowledge about recruitment trends regarding Social Networking Sites. With this study the phenomena of Social Networking Sites in recruitment was explored. Knowledge was acquired by making use of a survey, conducted in German companies. The following research question is answered within this thesis: To what extent does the use of Social Networking Sites lead to effective recruitment?
To answer the research question and to detect the extent to which the use of Social Networking Sites leads to effective recruitment, a research model was established in order to find relationships between the qualities of Social Networking Sites and effective recruitment. The chosen qualities of sites were information quality, popularity, networking scope, ease of navigation and security/privacy. Effective recruitment is characterized by the diversity of applicants, the quality of applicants/applications, the costs, the time and the target group orientation. Furthermore, the type of the site (business-oriented sites versus social-oriented sites) played an important role in this research. In addition, the usage frequency of the recruiter was of interest.
This study deals in understanding the more and more businesses are stepping into the social media arena to recruit viable candidates for positions at their companies—and having great success, according to social media gurus.
A Career Builder survey of more than 2,500 employers, released in August of this year, indicated 35percent of respondents use social media to promote their companies. Of those employers, 21percent are using it to recruit and research potential employees, and 18 percent are using it to strengthen their employment brands.
Companies that don't embrace social media as a recruitment tool might risk losing quality candidates to their competition that is focused on such outreach.
Other companies are doing it, and if you're not, you're missing out on a large candidate audience and top talent. In this new millennial cult of web browsing, socialization through Social Media Websites has become the new trend. Befriending someone who is sitting at other part of the world in front of computers with the help of internet, sharing ideas and thoughts, expressing views, supporting others views on issues of common interest, have become the new order among Internet users. As a recruiter needs the most talented, qualified and largest applicant pool, leveraging on the SMW to tap potential talent is called Social Media Recruitment.
You start to engage a candidate in a way you never could with recruiter because of(social media's)scalability and the ability to have a two-way dialog.
SCOPE OF STUDY
To know the current trends in SMR and target the Management graduate, among working professionals and online recruiter.
To understand the various aspirations of job seekers in social media & how it is different from other sectors.
The current trends in SMR in India.
Common mistakes companies make using social media tools in Recruiting efforts
LITERATURE REVIEW
As a recruiter needs the most talented, qualified and largest applicant pool, leveraging on the SMW to tap potential talent is called Social Media Recruitment. HR managers and recruiters these days click on the web and open a page on Facebook or Twitter not to update their friends or chat with the know circle, but to search for a talent pool to match their company’s requirements.
SMR is becoming a major source for recruitment and abuzz word in the corporate world. Increasingly, companies are taking to the social media arena to get the right and viable candidates for positions at various levels. In just a few years, newspapers advertisements shall almost be replaced by online job boards. Now, active recruiting at job fairs has met its competitions in the social media. This new system of finding, screening, and recruiting employees has unbelievable power to advance goals at a value price. If people think that youngsters these days are surfing social networking sites for entertainment, they may be wrong. On the contrary, they may be genuinely exploring the new job opportunities on such websites. Besides personal association with friends and relatives, websites such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter are promising as effective job search tools for Indian job seekers. They use these sites not just to check on job openings, but also to understand the prospective organisation work culture, system, founder, objectives, policies and activities, so that they know the company when they attend interviews. Strategies and tactics, but instead should supplement the solid recruiting practices companies already have in place.
Many people believe in integrating traditional recruiting strategies with social media strategies". It's very important to maintain the pieces that have resulted in successful hires from the past to date. Social media is meant to fuel your other strategies and help the companies utilise the available efficient manpower who are looking for a suitable job.
ADVANTAGES OF SOCIAL MEDIA
The following are some advantages of social media on recruitment:
Target passive candidates: Attracting passive candidates to engage quality job seekers is one of the critical aspects of recruiting through social media. There are many potential candidates on the social media who have the required skill sets for your company, but are not actively searching for a job. With social media, you can connect with such candidates and hire a right fit for your company. However, to achieve this mere posting and tweeting job openings on social networking sites would be insufficient Adoption of newer methods of social media and a long term strategy would lead to better engagement with your socially savvy audience and job seekers.
Showcasing employment brand: Social media profiles are one of the best options to showcase your employment brand, highlighting the factors that make your company a unique place for people to work. Content providing key information such as general industry employment trends, your company culture, career growth opportunities, and interview processes goes a long way in establishing an organisation’s goodwill and a worthy employer. Accomplishing this task successfully helps you to attract the right employee for your company, who is well defined about the mission and goals of the company. Besides, it will provide the job seekers with opportunities to ask questions and know more about your company’s culture and various other aspects which gives the employee a clear picture of the company..
Social referrals: If you already have a good number of fans, followers and connection on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, they can be used as social referrals. This is considered one of the best sources for hiring. Such referrals enable companies and recruiters to get networks possibly beyond their capacities. In fact, social referrals have taken a completely new meaning, as most of the top talent and target candidates hang out on social media. And getting such referrals is now faster, easier and more cost-effective, as LinkedIn has more than 100 million users and Facebook over 900 millions. And with each additional connection, your network reach continues to expand, which in turn helps you to find more targeted referrals.
Where to Start
It is important to understand how to best leverage the social networking sites. It
can seem daunting, with all the tools available today. However, sites and
tools are only part of the equation. As with any initiative, you want to spend some time thinking about your objectives in order to reach them. It is a good idea to take a step back and ask a few questions before you dive into the social networking pool.
According to the Human Capital Institute, there is a simple seven-step thought process you should go through before you get started with social recruiting:
1. What are our organization’s overall corporate goals?
2. What does our workforce plan look like in relation to those corporate goals?
3. Where do we have talent gaps based on our workforce plan?
4. What kinds of technology are attractive to the types of candidates we need?
5. What level of resource commitment are we willing to make?
6. How will we keep our content fresh?
7. When do we start?
Once you and your team have answered these questions, you can follow these next steps to plan for and launch social recruiting.
•Establish a plan-The answers to the seven questions above will form the basis of your social recruiting plan. You will know what sites and tools you will use, how much time to spend on social networks, and how to keep your content up to date for the employees to keep them in the loop.
•Check your brand image-Search on the internet for your company name or open jobs and see who is promoting your jobs over the internet. This will give you a good idea about what is being said about your brand and general thinking amongst the people. Determine who are your advocates and criticisers. Continue to monitor your brand image as you build your social recruiting program.
•Engage with potential candidates-Participate in your social networks by establishing a dialogue with potential candidates. Be real, mean what you say, and say what you mean. The type of individual who uses social networking tools expects your company to be transparent and approachable. If you hide behind an anonymous profile, potential candidates may not trust your communications
Powerful Tools, But Often Misused
Often times, recruiters open the floodgates of LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, with only a vague idea of how to turn these networks into powerful tools for sourcing and screening candidates. Though hiring professionals are giving their best to develop strategies for utilizing social media in their recruiting efforts.
For all their good intentions, many recruiters using social media to source and screen candidates are stumbling over the same issues. Here are the top three:
1. Spamming job posts. The surest way to alienate yourself from your talent pool and render your social recruiting efforts ineffective is to spam people with your job opportunities. You know, things like regularly flooding Twitter streams with the same job openings, or sending every “great opportunity” to passive candidates again and again. It becomes all too easy for even the best jobs to come off as white noise. The key is to be social and engaging. Share industry news and articles of interest, exchange personal messages and keep track of members of your network.
2. Prying rather than researching. Some positions certainly require a flawless social media presence (e.g., marketing or public relations reps, executive-level employees, etc). For the rest of the folks looking for jobs, though, the screening shouldn’t be focused on scanning through photos to see if candidates are suitable or not. There’s a fine line between professional research and what can be called as call “eStalking.” When using social media to screen candidates, look for things like relevant experience, professional work samples or overall impressions of their personality and interests to see if they would fit within your company culture. Ask yourself, if you were the candidate what information would be appropriate for the hiring company to know about you?
3. Penalizing candidates for level of access. Many candidates – especially Gen Y’ers – dichotomize their social media presence. It’s not uncommon for a candidate to deny recruiters access to their personal social profile (i.e. Facebook), and invite them to connect via LinkedIn instead. Be careful not to write off candidates for showing a bit of backbone and managing their public image – it’s hardly something to penalize. Rather, it could serve to answer any questions you may have about their ability to represent your organization
Facebook
While Facebook might seemingly have a reputation as a site where long lost friends connect, businesses are using it for recruiting purposes, particularly to promote their employment brand and excite people about possibly working at their companies. Facebook offers a variety of mediums for companies to communicate their message and corporate culture-from simple text and mini blogs, to photos, and video and audio clips, to polls and surveys. Facebook is optimal for engaging people. Aside from promoting corporate culture, companies are also posting jobs on their Facebook pages, or atleast linking users back to their corporate Website for career opportunities and applications. A fairly high conversion rate exists from
Twitter
Twitter might be over run with celebrities' and prominent individuals, but businesses are using it in a variety of ways, including to recruit talent. Many companies simply post open jobs to their Twitter account with a compressed URL for the corporate Website, which followers can link to for more information. Businesses may also search for talent on Twitter, just not to the level they can on Linkedin. Still, companies are able to identify candidates by querying for competencies, companies, activities or keywords; as well as sending direct messages to potential candidates. Twitter offers a special guide called Twitter101 for businesses on how to use the site to their advantage, along with best practices and case studies. The information is available on the Twitter Website. Determining Twitter's effectiveness might be difficult, however. Despite today's more than 100million registered users, a study released in January from RJ Metrics indicated about 10 to 15million accounts are actually active. At the time of the study. Twitter had 75million registered users—25percent of which had no followers; and upward of 40percent had one to five followers. Hartley said “companies who use Twitter must actively tweet to earn traction: Occasional random posts simply won't have an impact, he said. "I recommend active communication, especially during the job posting process," he said. "You have to respond. Otherwise, it doesn't set the company up for success.”
HOW SOCIAL MEDIA IS BEING USED
Social media appears to be successful in not only expanding talent pools, but in hiring
candidates as well. Sixty-four percent of respondents to a 2011 Jobvite survey said
they had successfully hired a candidate through a social network in 2011. Nearly all
survey respondents (95 percent) said they had hired someone through LinkedIn; 24
percent of respondents had hired someone through Facebook and 16 percent of
respondents had hired someone through Twitter.
The quality of hires is always a concern, and while recruiters continue to rank
employee referrals as the best source of quality of hires (8.6 on a scale of 10), social
networks fair well with a rank of seven on a scale of 10. Corporate career sites, third
-party recruiting firms, campus recruiting, job boards and search engines all ranked
below social networks in the quality of hires (Jobvite, 2011). It is important to note that
employee referrals and social networks are not mutually exclusive; some social
networks like BeKnown and BranchOut include features that encourage employees to recommend colleagues and friends.
LEGAL CONCERNS
Don't forget your legal obligations. "Social media are such new phenomena that we don't really know breadth of legal pitfalls," Spognardi says. One given is that federal and state laws banning discrimination still apply so employers should ensure they do not use social media to favor or exclude candidates based on protected characteristics. Countries have their own laws and regulations in place for the use of social media in the respective countries. Reaching out through social media can increase the number of inquiries you receive from potential candidates so ensure there is a system in place to quickly and easily separate high potential contacts from low and no potential contacts. Targeting social media participation to specific industry groups or people with particular skill sets is one way to reduce the workload.
Discrimination: Most employers have stringent employment policies that prevent their recruiters and hiring managers from learning potentially discriminatory information about candidates. Visiting a person's social media sites, however, clearly creates the opportunity to view large amounts of information contrary to these non-discriminatory practices. Individuals on their personal social media sites may disclose information about marital status, children, religion, politics, disabilities and even social interests that, by law, must be ignored in a hiring decision. If a recruiter has accessed this data, it is difficult to prove that they were not influenced by it in their hiring decision.
SOCIAL MEDIA RECRUITMENT TRENDS IN INDIA
Interestingly, Social Media as a channel for recruitment is still in its nascent stage. There is no limit to how we can use it. Unquestionable, Social Media has a good potential in helping the companies to recruit the right candidates , however, they must be on guard and take appropriate measures in case of adverse situations.
HR firm, Kelly Services says, more than one-in-five job aspirants in India access social networking sites to hunt for the right job. Another hiring major Ma Foi Randstad states that about 87% if Indian Employees use social media to find information about an organization’s work culture.
According to global workforce solutions leader, Kelly services latest survey with social networking having caught on in a big way, going through classifieds, meeting prospective employers over lunch, calling companies and getting connected to the HR department are all routines that seem passé. Using bump on your smartphone to exchange professional details, tweeting or posting on your Facebook walls are the new ways to hire or get hired. More than one in five job aspirants surveyed in India accesses social networking sites to hunt for the right job.
And interestingly, employees in the income brackets of Rs.2 to 5lakh p.a. and Rs.5 to 10lakh p.a. are seen the top users of these sites. Social Media has become a potential tool for both employer and employees and as low cost high return options. Social networking has completely revolutionized the way people look out for work and scout for information about the work culture of an organization. However, there is also anxiety among many of these folks about their potential career fallout from personal content on these sites. While social media is active as an employment tool, the rampant postings on these sites can equally be disastrous for careers.
Upto 2% of hiring takes place using social networking platforms but this figure will jump to 10-20% in few years, MBA driven industries such as marketing and finance have latched onto social networking for recruitment but the picture is set to change as more industries join in.”
Conclusion
Social networks offer a powerful tool for recruiters to reach a pool of qualified candidates that they might not otherwise be able to reach. Establishing your company within social networks also says a lot about your company to potential candidates and will create the perception that your company wants to connect with them. Social recruiting is another strategy you can use to find the best candidates before your competition, but it is not a complete solution. It must complement your other recruiting programs. The legal risks are real, and they should be considered as you examine your overall recruiting strategy. Once you educate yourself, establish your plan, and begin engaging with potential candidates, you can dramatically improve your recruiting results through social networks.
[attachment=66597]
INTRODUCTION
Current challenges and changes in technology and the role of the Internet open up new opportunities for companies to communicate and work. The fact that Social Networking Sites entered the business landscape, and in particular the recruitment landscape leads to a demand for knowledge about recruitment trends regarding Social Networking Sites. With this study the phenomena of Social Networking Sites in recruitment was explored. Knowledge was acquired by making use of a survey, conducted in German companies. The following research question is answered within this thesis: To what extent does the use of Social Networking Sites lead to effective recruitment?
To answer the research question and to detect the extent to which the use of Social Networking Sites leads to effective recruitment, a research model was established in order to find relationships between the qualities of Social Networking Sites and effective recruitment. The chosen qualities of sites were information quality, popularity, networking scope, ease of navigation and security/privacy. Effective recruitment is characterized by the diversity of applicants, the quality of applicants/applications, the costs, the time and the target group orientation. Furthermore, the type of the site (business-oriented sites versus social-oriented sites) played an important role in this research. In addition, the usage frequency of the recruiter was of interest.
This study deals in understanding the more and more businesses are stepping into the social media arena to recruit viable candidates for positions at their companies—and having great success, according to social media gurus.
A Career Builder survey of more than 2,500 employers, released in August of this year, indicated 35percent of respondents use social media to promote their companies. Of those employers, 21percent are using it to recruit and research potential employees, and 18 percent are using it to strengthen their employment brands.
Companies that don't embrace social media as a recruitment tool might risk losing quality candidates to their competition that is focused on such outreach.
Other companies are doing it, and if you're not, you're missing out on a large candidate audience and top talent. In this new millennial cult of web browsing, socialization through Social Media Websites has become the new trend. Befriending someone who is sitting at other part of the world in front of computers with the help of internet, sharing ideas and thoughts, expressing views, supporting others views on issues of common interest, have become the new order among Internet users. As a recruiter needs the most talented, qualified and largest applicant pool, leveraging on the SMW to tap potential talent is called Social Media Recruitment.
You start to engage a candidate in a way you never could with recruiter because of(social media's)scalability and the ability to have a two-way dialog.
SCOPE OF STUDY
To know the current trends in SMR and target the Management graduate, among working professionals and online recruiter.
To understand the various aspirations of job seekers in social media & how it is different from other sectors.
The current trends in SMR in India.
Common mistakes companies make using social media tools in Recruiting efforts
LITERATURE REVIEW
As a recruiter needs the most talented, qualified and largest applicant pool, leveraging on the SMW to tap potential talent is called Social Media Recruitment. HR managers and recruiters these days click on the web and open a page on Facebook or Twitter not to update their friends or chat with the know circle, but to search for a talent pool to match their company’s requirements.
SMR is becoming a major source for recruitment and abuzz word in the corporate world. Increasingly, companies are taking to the social media arena to get the right and viable candidates for positions at various levels. In just a few years, newspapers advertisements shall almost be replaced by online job boards. Now, active recruiting at job fairs has met its competitions in the social media. This new system of finding, screening, and recruiting employees has unbelievable power to advance goals at a value price. If people think that youngsters these days are surfing social networking sites for entertainment, they may be wrong. On the contrary, they may be genuinely exploring the new job opportunities on such websites. Besides personal association with friends and relatives, websites such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter are promising as effective job search tools for Indian job seekers. They use these sites not just to check on job openings, but also to understand the prospective organisation work culture, system, founder, objectives, policies and activities, so that they know the company when they attend interviews. Strategies and tactics, but instead should supplement the solid recruiting practices companies already have in place.
Many people believe in integrating traditional recruiting strategies with social media strategies". It's very important to maintain the pieces that have resulted in successful hires from the past to date. Social media is meant to fuel your other strategies and help the companies utilise the available efficient manpower who are looking for a suitable job.
ADVANTAGES OF SOCIAL MEDIA
The following are some advantages of social media on recruitment:
Target passive candidates: Attracting passive candidates to engage quality job seekers is one of the critical aspects of recruiting through social media. There are many potential candidates on the social media who have the required skill sets for your company, but are not actively searching for a job. With social media, you can connect with such candidates and hire a right fit for your company. However, to achieve this mere posting and tweeting job openings on social networking sites would be insufficient Adoption of newer methods of social media and a long term strategy would lead to better engagement with your socially savvy audience and job seekers.
Showcasing employment brand: Social media profiles are one of the best options to showcase your employment brand, highlighting the factors that make your company a unique place for people to work. Content providing key information such as general industry employment trends, your company culture, career growth opportunities, and interview processes goes a long way in establishing an organisation’s goodwill and a worthy employer. Accomplishing this task successfully helps you to attract the right employee for your company, who is well defined about the mission and goals of the company. Besides, it will provide the job seekers with opportunities to ask questions and know more about your company’s culture and various other aspects which gives the employee a clear picture of the company..
Social referrals: If you already have a good number of fans, followers and connection on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, they can be used as social referrals. This is considered one of the best sources for hiring. Such referrals enable companies and recruiters to get networks possibly beyond their capacities. In fact, social referrals have taken a completely new meaning, as most of the top talent and target candidates hang out on social media. And getting such referrals is now faster, easier and more cost-effective, as LinkedIn has more than 100 million users and Facebook over 900 millions. And with each additional connection, your network reach continues to expand, which in turn helps you to find more targeted referrals.
Where to Start
It is important to understand how to best leverage the social networking sites. It
can seem daunting, with all the tools available today. However, sites and
tools are only part of the equation. As with any initiative, you want to spend some time thinking about your objectives in order to reach them. It is a good idea to take a step back and ask a few questions before you dive into the social networking pool.
According to the Human Capital Institute, there is a simple seven-step thought process you should go through before you get started with social recruiting:
1. What are our organization’s overall corporate goals?
2. What does our workforce plan look like in relation to those corporate goals?
3. Where do we have talent gaps based on our workforce plan?
4. What kinds of technology are attractive to the types of candidates we need?
5. What level of resource commitment are we willing to make?
6. How will we keep our content fresh?
7. When do we start?
Once you and your team have answered these questions, you can follow these next steps to plan for and launch social recruiting.
•Establish a plan-The answers to the seven questions above will form the basis of your social recruiting plan. You will know what sites and tools you will use, how much time to spend on social networks, and how to keep your content up to date for the employees to keep them in the loop.
•Check your brand image-Search on the internet for your company name or open jobs and see who is promoting your jobs over the internet. This will give you a good idea about what is being said about your brand and general thinking amongst the people. Determine who are your advocates and criticisers. Continue to monitor your brand image as you build your social recruiting program.
•Engage with potential candidates-Participate in your social networks by establishing a dialogue with potential candidates. Be real, mean what you say, and say what you mean. The type of individual who uses social networking tools expects your company to be transparent and approachable. If you hide behind an anonymous profile, potential candidates may not trust your communications
Powerful Tools, But Often Misused
Often times, recruiters open the floodgates of LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, with only a vague idea of how to turn these networks into powerful tools for sourcing and screening candidates. Though hiring professionals are giving their best to develop strategies for utilizing social media in their recruiting efforts.
For all their good intentions, many recruiters using social media to source and screen candidates are stumbling over the same issues. Here are the top three:
1. Spamming job posts. The surest way to alienate yourself from your talent pool and render your social recruiting efforts ineffective is to spam people with your job opportunities. You know, things like regularly flooding Twitter streams with the same job openings, or sending every “great opportunity” to passive candidates again and again. It becomes all too easy for even the best jobs to come off as white noise. The key is to be social and engaging. Share industry news and articles of interest, exchange personal messages and keep track of members of your network.
2. Prying rather than researching. Some positions certainly require a flawless social media presence (e.g., marketing or public relations reps, executive-level employees, etc). For the rest of the folks looking for jobs, though, the screening shouldn’t be focused on scanning through photos to see if candidates are suitable or not. There’s a fine line between professional research and what can be called as call “eStalking.” When using social media to screen candidates, look for things like relevant experience, professional work samples or overall impressions of their personality and interests to see if they would fit within your company culture. Ask yourself, if you were the candidate what information would be appropriate for the hiring company to know about you?
3. Penalizing candidates for level of access. Many candidates – especially Gen Y’ers – dichotomize their social media presence. It’s not uncommon for a candidate to deny recruiters access to their personal social profile (i.e. Facebook), and invite them to connect via LinkedIn instead. Be careful not to write off candidates for showing a bit of backbone and managing their public image – it’s hardly something to penalize. Rather, it could serve to answer any questions you may have about their ability to represent your organization
While Facebook might seemingly have a reputation as a site where long lost friends connect, businesses are using it for recruiting purposes, particularly to promote their employment brand and excite people about possibly working at their companies. Facebook offers a variety of mediums for companies to communicate their message and corporate culture-from simple text and mini blogs, to photos, and video and audio clips, to polls and surveys. Facebook is optimal for engaging people. Aside from promoting corporate culture, companies are also posting jobs on their Facebook pages, or atleast linking users back to their corporate Website for career opportunities and applications. A fairly high conversion rate exists from
Twitter might be over run with celebrities' and prominent individuals, but businesses are using it in a variety of ways, including to recruit talent. Many companies simply post open jobs to their Twitter account with a compressed URL for the corporate Website, which followers can link to for more information. Businesses may also search for talent on Twitter, just not to the level they can on Linkedin. Still, companies are able to identify candidates by querying for competencies, companies, activities or keywords; as well as sending direct messages to potential candidates. Twitter offers a special guide called Twitter101 for businesses on how to use the site to their advantage, along with best practices and case studies. The information is available on the Twitter Website. Determining Twitter's effectiveness might be difficult, however. Despite today's more than 100million registered users, a study released in January from RJ Metrics indicated about 10 to 15million accounts are actually active. At the time of the study. Twitter had 75million registered users—25percent of which had no followers; and upward of 40percent had one to five followers. Hartley said “companies who use Twitter must actively tweet to earn traction: Occasional random posts simply won't have an impact, he said. "I recommend active communication, especially during the job posting process," he said. "You have to respond. Otherwise, it doesn't set the company up for success.”
HOW SOCIAL MEDIA IS BEING USED
Social media appears to be successful in not only expanding talent pools, but in hiring
candidates as well. Sixty-four percent of respondents to a 2011 Jobvite survey said
they had successfully hired a candidate through a social network in 2011. Nearly all
survey respondents (95 percent) said they had hired someone through LinkedIn; 24
percent of respondents had hired someone through Facebook and 16 percent of
respondents had hired someone through Twitter.
The quality of hires is always a concern, and while recruiters continue to rank
employee referrals as the best source of quality of hires (8.6 on a scale of 10), social
networks fair well with a rank of seven on a scale of 10. Corporate career sites, third
-party recruiting firms, campus recruiting, job boards and search engines all ranked
below social networks in the quality of hires (Jobvite, 2011). It is important to note that
employee referrals and social networks are not mutually exclusive; some social
networks like BeKnown and BranchOut include features that encourage employees to recommend colleagues and friends.
LEGAL CONCERNS
Don't forget your legal obligations. "Social media are such new phenomena that we don't really know breadth of legal pitfalls," Spognardi says. One given is that federal and state laws banning discrimination still apply so employers should ensure they do not use social media to favor or exclude candidates based on protected characteristics. Countries have their own laws and regulations in place for the use of social media in the respective countries. Reaching out through social media can increase the number of inquiries you receive from potential candidates so ensure there is a system in place to quickly and easily separate high potential contacts from low and no potential contacts. Targeting social media participation to specific industry groups or people with particular skill sets is one way to reduce the workload.
Discrimination: Most employers have stringent employment policies that prevent their recruiters and hiring managers from learning potentially discriminatory information about candidates. Visiting a person's social media sites, however, clearly creates the opportunity to view large amounts of information contrary to these non-discriminatory practices. Individuals on their personal social media sites may disclose information about marital status, children, religion, politics, disabilities and even social interests that, by law, must be ignored in a hiring decision. If a recruiter has accessed this data, it is difficult to prove that they were not influenced by it in their hiring decision.
SOCIAL MEDIA RECRUITMENT TRENDS IN INDIA
Interestingly, Social Media as a channel for recruitment is still in its nascent stage. There is no limit to how we can use it. Unquestionable, Social Media has a good potential in helping the companies to recruit the right candidates , however, they must be on guard and take appropriate measures in case of adverse situations.
HR firm, Kelly Services says, more than one-in-five job aspirants in India access social networking sites to hunt for the right job. Another hiring major Ma Foi Randstad states that about 87% if Indian Employees use social media to find information about an organization’s work culture.
According to global workforce solutions leader, Kelly services latest survey with social networking having caught on in a big way, going through classifieds, meeting prospective employers over lunch, calling companies and getting connected to the HR department are all routines that seem passé. Using bump on your smartphone to exchange professional details, tweeting or posting on your Facebook walls are the new ways to hire or get hired. More than one in five job aspirants surveyed in India accesses social networking sites to hunt for the right job.
And interestingly, employees in the income brackets of Rs.2 to 5lakh p.a. and Rs.5 to 10lakh p.a. are seen the top users of these sites. Social Media has become a potential tool for both employer and employees and as low cost high return options. Social networking has completely revolutionized the way people look out for work and scout for information about the work culture of an organization. However, there is also anxiety among many of these folks about their potential career fallout from personal content on these sites. While social media is active as an employment tool, the rampant postings on these sites can equally be disastrous for careers.
Upto 2% of hiring takes place using social networking platforms but this figure will jump to 10-20% in few years, MBA driven industries such as marketing and finance have latched onto social networking for recruitment but the picture is set to change as more industries join in.”
Conclusion
Social networks offer a powerful tool for recruiters to reach a pool of qualified candidates that they might not otherwise be able to reach. Establishing your company within social networks also says a lot about your company to potential candidates and will create the perception that your company wants to connect with them. Social recruiting is another strategy you can use to find the best candidates before your competition, but it is not a complete solution. It must complement your other recruiting programs. The legal risks are real, and they should be considered as you examine your overall recruiting strategy. Once you educate yourself, establish your plan, and begin engaging with potential candidates, you can dramatically improve your recruiting results through social networks.