The Use of Social Media in the Hiring Process
Introduction
The last few years can be characterized as truly revolutionary for human resources management in general and hiring process in particular. The reason for big changes is quick and panoptic rise of social media influence on nearly every aspect of personal and business life. According to recent research (Smith, 2016), the biggest social network, Facebook, has 1.591 billion active users, among of which 65% use Facebook every day.
And, what is more important for business, 91% of millennials (15-34 years old people) have Facebook accounts (Smith, 2016). As this group is the most economically active, their presence in social media naturally attracts business attention to them. Business considers these people not only as its target audience and potential customers, but also as potential employees. This fact stimulated human resources managers developing new methods of hiring people in online environment.
Therefore, it seems appropriate to analyze dynamics of social media usage for recruiting and discover the most popular social networks capable of searching for candidates, investigate benefits and risks of hiring employees via social networks, and, finally, review innovative big data methods of hiring employees online used today. All these topics will be covered in this paper.
Dynamics of Social Media Usage for Recruiting
According to different estimations, from 75% to 95% of companies and HR managers use social media for recruiting new employees.
Top-class developer of human resources management SaaS (software-as-a-service) platform, Jobvite, gives even more impressive information on intensity of social media usage in recruitment. According to Jobvite survey held in 2008, 78% of recruiters used or planned to use social media in the process of headhunting (Jobvite, 2013). In 2011 this indicator increased 89% and in 2013 it reached 94%. And in the newest similar survey it was discovered that 96% of HR managers use social media in assessing potential employees (Jobvite, 2015). Jobvite states that social media is stably the second largest “source” of new employees for companies: 56% of candidates found via social networks get an offer. The only better variant for hiring motivated professionals is getting information about them from referrals (see fig. 1).
Figure 1. Quality of different recruiting sources (Jobvite, 2015).
If talking about the most popular social networks used for hiring process, it is clear that in the last few years LinkedIn dominates with significant advantage over its two biggest competitors – Facebook and Twitter. In 2015 LinkedIn was used in 87% of total cases of social media usage for hiring new employees (Jobvite, 2015). Interestingly, HR managers use many social networks to get information about candidates, among which one can find YouTube, Instagram, Vimeo, Tumblr and even such niche social media as Pinterest and Periscope.
Benefits and risks of hiring employees via social networks
The first and most important advantage of using social media in hiring process is ability to get a variety of valuable additional data about the candidates. As researchers discovered in the Jobvite 2015 Recruiter Nation Survey, the most widely used information available in candidate’s profiles in social networks is length of job tenure (average and with current employer), mutual connections with company, commitment to professional organizations and examples of written or design work (portfolio).
Besides that, in most cases social media allows to build an approximate psychological portrait of potential employee. A lot of implications can be made basing on shared details of volunteer and professional work, engagement with current events in local area, presence of spelling and grammar mistakes in social network posts, information revealing candidate’s pernicious habits (e.g. details on alcohol consumption, smoking) and even presence of selfies (Jobvite, 2015).
Using social networks often gives a recruiter possibility to observe sensitive personal information or personal characteristics like age, marital status, religion, race, sexual orientation etc. Taking such information consideration is very risky because its usage may lead to discrimination of an applicant, which is subject to potential lawsuit from candidate (Lawrence, 2013). It is also important to mention, that personal information perceive by HR manager can be controversial. For example, a recruiter sees information in candidate’s profile about his behavior at birthday. There he sees the photographs of excessive alcohol consumption. Does it necessarily give evidence of candidate’s high level of alcoholism? It certainly doesn’t (maybe candidate allows himself this only once a year). But recruiter’s personal experience in this situation directs him to potentially wrong decision.
In their efforts of getting any possible information about candidates, HR managers often tend to go beyond just observing publicly available information on candidate’s profile in social network. Knowing the fact that in some economy sectors there’s a heavy competition between candidates, recruiters exploit this peculiarity and may even ask applicants providing their credentials (login and password) to get access to complete information shared by them in a social media. This, of course, makes serious damage to applicant’s privacy. But nevertheless, candidates may accept it due to strong willingness of getting job (Carlton, 2014; Lawrence).
Though social networks have become one of the major channels of attracting new employees to the company, they still bear a number of risks concerning improper perception of candidates’ profiles in social media. Therefore, such risks should be carefully assessed in each particular case of hiring candidates. Taking this peculiarity into consideration, each company should gain its own balance between positive and negative sides of social media usage in HR management.
Innovative big data methods of hiring in online environment
Over recent years a number of innovative approaches to searching for candidates in online environment emerged. The most notable of them is applying big data principles to recruiting process.
With the course of time it is becoming more and more difficult to find skilled professionals who would perfectly match the needs of the business. Sometimes companies have to seek for appropriate candidates around the whole world. In this situation the task of being able to receive, process and analyze information about thousands of candidates becomes unsolvable for each particular company. As a response to demand of conducting such big-scale research, a number of so called big data recruiting outsource companies appeared. Such companies declare that they can find new talents even before they consciously enter the job market.
Such companies not just analyze candidates’ profiles in LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. It is important, that they also take into account their activity on specialized sites relative to their professions such as GitHub and StackOverflow (for programmers), Dribbble (for designers), Proformative (for accountants) etc. This approach opens great opportunities to find and evaluate candidates by their actual achievements and contributions to professional society rather than by their ability to sell themselves in social media, CV and interviews. Big data allows recruiters to significantly mitigate the risk of making wrong decisions in hiring process.
The companies operating in this field have developed special methodology of looking for professionals, who are difficult to find using traditional ways. Companies like Gild are analyzing information in the Internet about candidates using a set of clue indicators for each profession (Meister, 2014). For example, in case company is looking for qualified programmer, the following clues may be examined:
programmer’s code rating according to other programmer feedback (literally counting the number of likes and reposts of code in social media and specialized sites);
frequency of code parts reuse in bigger projects;
how close are candidate’s connection to other professionals in his industry;
ability of candidate to communicate with other professionals, discuss his ideas and ability to take criticism in a proper way (made using quantitative and qualitative analysis of comments activity below his posts).
The other group of companies, to which Entelo and TalentBin can be referred, use different method of looking for needed candidates. They focus on monitoring changes in users’ profiles rather than just monitoring static picture of what is present in user accounts. For example, these companies can select only those people, who have recently updated their biographies. If such biography updates somehow refer to person’s professional skills, he is automatically chosen by the system as a perspective candidate (Meister, 2014).
The final goal of these different big data approaches for every company is finding the skilled professional, who is not visible in social media at the moment – before it will be done by competitors.
Conclusion
As it was discovered in the paper, social media usage is one of the mainstream methods of headhunting, which is actual today and will be even more actual in the nearest future. Using social media for evaluating and screening candidates is considered now as a must for every HR manager. And in case benefits and risks balance of this hiring method is properly assessed, its effectiveness may be very high. Recruiters should also understand that the job market is developing very quickly, therefore new methods of searching for talents like big data recruiting are constantly emerging. In order to be competitive, HR management should be very flexible to what happening in the market.
References
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Jobvite. (2013). 2013 Social Recruiting Survey Results. Jobvite. Retrieved from http://web.jobvite.com/rs/jobvite/images/Jobvite_2013_SocialRecruitingSurveyResults.pdf.
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Lawrence, A. Why You Should NOT Use Social Media to Make Hiring Decisions. Select Perspectives Blog. Retrieved from http://www.selectinternational.com/blog/social-media-hiring-decisions.
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Smith, C. (2016, February 14). By the Numbers: 200+ Amazing Facebook Statistics (January 2016). DMR. Retrieved from http://expandedramblings.com/index.php/by-the-numbers-17-amazing-facebook-stats/.
