Executive summary
This article will highlight some of the effects that social media has on employment, given that a vast number of people across the world, both young and old spend some of their precious time on social media. Social media is very interactive and people tend to make friends worldwide, but the question is, can social media affect a person’s employment? The article will also analyze some vivid circumstances on how social media affected the employment opportunity of various people, and the reasons behind the causes. Since social media is very common across the world, the way people use it is different, meaning that while some people use it negatively, others use it positively with an objective of making their social life good.
Introduction
Social media are computerized tools that enable people to make a forum in which they can easily connect and share ideas, pictures, videos as well as interacting through networks. Social media enables a person to connect with another person anywhere in the world and they become friends and interact as if they have been friends all their lives. Social media also help people to share their problems with others, in a belief that even if they are strangers, they will give the solace that one needs during his or her time of problems. It also helps in the sharing of pictures and videos, and this makes it lively when commenting about the best or the funniest picture or video. Most importantly, social media helps in the sharing of world’s hottest news, as well as the most sensitive news that affects people in one way or the other. Again, people share their There are several social media that are used in the world today, but the most commonly used include;
Twitter
Instangram
LinkedIn
Snapchat
As stated earlier, social media can be used in socialization and sharing posts, and most importantly, it can also be a key player in the employment. Therefore, this report will look into various ways social media is used in an organizational context, and how it affects employment given that it can affect employment either negatively or positively.
Literature review
Social media can make one lose employment opportunity in an organization. According to CareerBuilder, about 65% of the employers screen the kind of candidates they will require to add in their organizational team through the social media (Haefner, 2009). An employer for instance may visit the social media pages of the candidate, to evaluate how they present them professionally. By doing so, they learn the other side of the candidate without disclosing it to them, a nd when they see the candidate is the right person for the job according to his or her social media pages, they hire them. However, if they realize that the candidate presents him or herself as unprofessional in the social media, or they do not consider hiring them. In most cases, those people that post commends on discrimination as well as negative comments about their former employers or their former employees have enough reasons not to be employed. This is because, they will do the same or even worse thing once they get a job elsewhere (Haefner, 2009).
Social media can also trigger an employee to lose his or her employment. Social media sites are very interesting and attractive, and therefore, they are very addictive. An employee, for instance, may engage him or herself to chat with friends in the place of work, and forget that they are at their workplace. This may make them to spend every minute chatting with friends oversee or even their families, thereby abandoning the work they were assigned by their employers. The end result is thet they take too much time to do something that would have been done for a short time, and this reduces the overall productivity of the organization. Generally, the objective of any organization is to maximize production, meaning that any employee reducing the expected production because of wasting their time on social media is dismissed without warning.
Social media give a wrong impression about an employee. In most cases, employees behave excellently when they are at their places of work, and their behaviors please their employers. However, the private life of an employee is illustrated by how they behave on the social media, which is in most cases different from their real figure in workplace. Therefore, the manager tends to get a wrong impression of the employee especially if what they post on their social media does not correspond with how they behave in the workplace. This may result in a confusion and lack of trust for the employees because of a speculation that employees are not who they claim to be.
Social media projects possible employment opportunities making it a vehicle for advertising employment opportunities. Since social media is very common at every corner of the world, many employers as well as managers prefer to use it to advertise for a job vacant in their organizations. Obviously, many people use social media, and therefore, managers and employers believe that the message they post, either in their personal social media pages or that of their organization will reach many people very fast. Their speculation is always correct, because information spread through the social media within the shortest time possible. Employers state the vacant position in their organization, as well as the requirements that an applicant must have, and most importantly, the contacts and address to send the applications to.
Social media creates a forum in which, a visibility is formed that projects the candidacy of an individual for employment. On this note, any candidate looking for jobs can make them visible by creating their profiles and posting it online. The profile indicates what their professional is, their talents as well as their skills that make it easy for employers to point their favorite candidate. Besides, social media encourages networking from one person to another. Generally, when people make their profiles visible online, they make it easier for them to network with other people, and that can create good opportunities that will make them prosperous. On the same not, social media provides people with other opportunities that they were not expecting, but matches with the skills indicated in their online profiles. Again, social media helps people to get online employment opportunities that make them convenient to work at the comfort of their homes.
Skeels and Grudin (2009) on their research in America, realized that a good fraction of people use social media particularly facebook at their workplace to know about their colleagues so as to strengthen the relationship between them. In their research, they also realized that social media may reduce or improve their professionalism with their workers, in case they realize that a person is different from how they express them in the social media. Therefore, their relationships weaken and this may lead to employment conflict which may even end up in dismissal of either one or both of the workers.
In addition, Andrea et al. (2010) did a research in United Kingdom, where they employed a method of methodology to learn more about social media and employment. In their research, they realized that its true social media can lead to the dismissal of employment, but it can also lead to employment opportunities. To ascertain their research, they interviewed the security policy manager of British Company (BT), human resource adviser of Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC), and the human resource team of Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service (Acas) (Andrea et al. 2010, pg 5). In all these areas, they emphasized on effects that social media has on employment, and they realized that it has either positive and negative impacts in one way or the other.
Data analysis
The use of internet has increased dramatically over the past decade, and this has led to many people using internet for their personal gains or for commercial gains. In a research done in UK, Dutton and Gerber (2010) realized that 61% of employed individuals use internet in their workplace, meaning that they spend approximately 7hrs online. On other instances, Andrea et al. (2011, p 6) realized that 55% of workers in United Kingdom access internet during working hours, 16% access social media for about thirty minutes in a day, while 6% spend an hour per day in social media. The time spent on social media especially on personal gains reduces the productivity of the organization, with 55% claiming that social media never affect their productivity, but 11% admitted to be less productive (Andrea et al., 2011, p7).
Andrea et al. (2011,p 8) also realized that social media is a potential recruitment site where potential employees meet with potential employers. According to their research, 2,667 human resource professionals in US which is approximately 45% check the profiles of job applicants through the social media before applying them, but the same procedure only applies to 27% in UK.
Kaplan (2013) realized that social media has made a great impact in the workplace, because an approximate of more than one billion people use social media. The higher percentage of the social media users goes to young people, who prefer social media for interacting bas well as looking for employment opportunities. Young people, especially those fresh from colleges would prefer to apply job online instead of going for an interview that they know not on how they will perform. In America, most of the graduates use social media for instance in job hunting, as illustrated in the graph below;
Source: Pew Research Center surveys. Retrieved from http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/10/08/social-networking-usage-2005-2015/
Besides, all people under any age group use social media, but their usage varies with age with young people below the age of 29yrs dominating the use of social media, in which is believed to be job hunting during their most active age bracket as illustrated below;
Source: Pew Research Center surveys. Retrieved from http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/10/08/social-networking-usage-2005-2015/
According to this statistic, it is clear that young people especially graduates have found it convincing to use social media to connect them with the digital world. They post their profiles online and update every bit of their success and professions so as to attract a wide range of recruiters who might be looking for some or all the qualities they posses. Some of the undergraduate start updating their profiles earlier before completing their studies, with a belief that they will possess a better competitive advantage in their employment search.
Conclusion
The use of internet has increased drastically throughout the globe. With the current technology and the digital world, many people desire to use social media sites for interaction, but others use it more extensively in search of employment as well as search for the right job applicants. Social media has both negative and positive impact on employment, but how well it is used especially in workplace determines how well a person will get rewarded. In some instances, social media reduces productivity in workplaces, but in other instances, it increases productivity in workplace. It is important to have a social media policy at the working place, so as to allow workers to access their social media at some point, because the denial to use social media at the workplace might increase the desire to use it when not well supervised. According to a survey conducted on 2011, a work place with social media policy increases productivity, because they will have no intention to use social media for personal issues as illustrated below;
Source: pew research center: Social Media and Work Place. September 2014. Retrieved from http://www.pewinternet.org/2016/06/22/social-media-and-the-workplace/pi_2016-06-22_social-media-and-work_0-03/
This means that workers use social media for organizational issues such as learning how they can improve customer relations. Therefore, as much as internet is concerned, social media is used vastly for employment.
Besides, it has been deduced that most of the employers use social media to get the best candidates for the job as dictated from their social media profiles. Most importantly, most of the employers prefer to use social media such as LinkedIn to post any vacant position in their workplace, and give details on the application process and vet their right candidates online, other than carrying out an interview. Generally, social media is the best form of searching employment which is known as job hunting, and it is also the best when it comes to vetting the right person for the job. Therefore, people especially young people fresh from colleges and universities should be encouraged to use social media on things that will benefit their lives, inclusive of searching for employment.
References
Andrea, B., Tom, H., Ben, H. and Annette, C. 2010, Workplaces and Social Networking: The Implications for Employment Relations. Ref: 11/11. Pg 1-49
Dutton, W Helsper, E Gerber, M, 2009. The Internet in Britain 2009 Oxford Institute for the Internet
Haefner, R., 2009. More Employers Screening Candidates via Social Networking Sites. Retrieved June, 1, p.2011.
Kaplan, C. 2013. Social Media in the Workplace – Employers Must Now Comply With Strict NLRB Oversight. JD Supra Law News
Skeels, M.M. and Grudin, J., 2009, May. When Social Networks Cross Boundaries: a Case Study of Workplace Use of Facebook and Linkedin. In Proceedings of the ACM 2009 international conference on Supporting group work (pp. 95-104). ACM.
