Using social media for recruitment

The internet has come a long way from where it had started in 1969. It has evolved and has come to be an indispensable part of our daily lives today. India has close to 100 billion internet users today, and a research says that 4 out of 5 English speaking persons in urban India are hooked to the World Wide Web. The internet has penetrated all aspects of our lives, spurred by a rash of cheaper devices and affordable broadband plans, and is an indelible part of life today. Business today depends a lot on the internet in terms of marketing and reaching out to its customers. Every aspect of business has a virtual arm today, and it is only natural, that HR and recruitment have also found its place in the vast interlinked network of the internet.

Networking over the social media is considered to be important today, and it too has evolved from merely serving as a platform to find old friends, to making business connections and associations. Almost every internet literate person today has a social media presence and this is used as an opportunity by recruiters to do a background check on potential employees. A web presence today comes with equal boon and blessing. Whilst it gives a person the necessary and required presence and exposure to headhunters, it also can work against him if loose or banal information is provided on the person’s personal page.

Advantages of social media recruitment:

• Job candidates can be searched geographically and found with higher accuracy than before, narrowing the number of candidates and adding to recruiting effectiveness.
• Available jobs can get filled quicker, lowering vacancy rates because of social media's high usage rate and immediate response time.
• Social media recruitment has a low cost with high ROI.
• High number social media users are college students, creating a great way to attract fresh talent for entry level positions.
• Access to the top job candidates is faster, helping a company's ability to attract talent versus competitors.
• Increases the employer's brand visibility online and establishes a leading-edge image for the brand.
• Open positions will be seen and read by a larger number of qualified candidates.

Like everything, there are two sides to this coin too. A scouring of one’s social media page can throw up some details that one would like to keep away from the recruiter’s eye. Looking at recruitment over the social media from the candidate’s point of view, one might conclude that it is no more enough to create a web profile of your choice, which would cater to only friends and serve to increase your social network.

Today, one needs to be careful about the kind of matter that one adds into his profile, and the kind of comments that he makes online. One also needs to take care to choose communities and associates online carefully, as recruiters today are prone to do a background check on a potential employee to see whether the said person is on the same page as the organization’s culture.