Luring talent through social media

Monday, 3 February 2014 00:00 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

Facebook has more than 1.2 billion fans around the globe. LinkedIn offers many connections with more than 260 million users. Social networking has started shaping our lives in a big way. How can we use it to attract talent? Has it been successful so far? Today’s column will begin a series of discussions on the use of social media for hiring and other HR activities. Overview With the rapid technological advancements over the years, social media has come to the forefront, offering solutions to people issues. Social

media refers to the means of interacting among people, through which they create, share, and exchange information and ideas in virtual communities and networks. Hiring, essentially, deals with the acquisition of the right employee to the right job. It is a case of “buying” talent and offering the right rewards. According to the technicalities of human resource management (HRM), recruitment is filling up the pool with eligible candidates and selection begins thereafter. Social media is synonymous with social network websites (SNWs) such as Facebook, MySpace and the more professionally-oriented LinkedIn. SNWs, as well as related applications (e.g. micro-blogging websites such as Twitter), also allow recruiters to conduct extensive background checks. SNWs allow individual users to post personal information on the internet in order to communicate with friends. Twitter allows short weblog (blog) messages of 140 characters (called tweets) and full social network websites such as Facebook, Google Plus and MySpace allow users to post and share multiple pages and include photos and videos; friends can also make comments. SNWs can also be regarded as well-established as a consumer and brand oriented set of tools. Increasingly, they are being offered as an innovative solution for internal effectiveness. SNWs have made a significant impact on the US’s social life. According to a recent study by KPMG, the following numbers show how SNWs are shining:

76% of US companies used LinkedIn’s 100 million registered users for recruiting.
84% of job seekers have a Facebook profile and 48% of them have done at least one job-hunting activity on Facebook in the past year.
61% of millennials (those born after 1980) don’t go to the traditional company support groups first; they prefer to turn to the web and other external resources.

Corporate e-mail is growing by 20-25% per year, with data storage costs soaring.
41% of 2011 university graduates used social media in their job search.
40% of companies admit to having no training or governance of social media.
Social networking is still the fastest growing active social media behaviour online, increasing from 36% of global internet users to 59% managing their profile on a monthly basis by the end of 2011.

China is the most socially engaged market in the world, with 84% of internet users contributing
36% of social media users post brand-related content.
60% of employees would like help from employers to share relevant content.

SNWs and HRM As we are much aware, talent attraction is becoming increasingly challenging. As the above-mentioned KPMG study states, talent acquisition is one of the first areas within many companies to embrace the social media opportunity. At its best, this can include accelerating the entire recruiting process from posting openings to sourcing candidates, reviewing résumés, making an offer and on boarding. However, advances in talent acquisition can present a challenge to your company’s internal communication and HR practices. Newly hired employees who had a great online experience maybe surprised to find that the internal systems and culture of the company are not as advanced or sophisticated – they may not even have access to those same recruiting sites while at work. As technology advances, human resource (HR) managers are increasingly inundated with new sources of information. According to Ross Slovensky and William H. Ross from the University of Wisconsin, there is an increasing trend of HR professionals using SNWs for hiring. SNWs allow individual users to post personal information on the internet in order to communicate with friends. Much of this information is unprotected and available to anyone that finds it to view – although SNW users can usually adjust their ‘privacy settings’ to allow only ‘friends’ to see certain information.

Facts such as age, location and relationship status, as well as personal thoughts and pictures are widely available through these forms of social media, and allow a level of immediate intimacy that has never before existed. For example, users can access Facebook and find a person they recently met and immediately learn personal details of the person’s life – details that may have taken months or years to learn in previous generations. Apparently, many people who post such details do not carefully consider their potential audience. Who is reading their SNW profiles? HR professionals, of course. Employers reading SNW profiles HR professionals in the USA are increasingly looking to SNWs to find information about candidates so that the correct hire can be made. As a Careerbuilder.com survey done five years ago revealed, the percentage of managers who look at SNW profiles as a way to screen candidates rose from 22% in 2008 to 45% in 2009. Approximately 11% more plan to use social media to screen applicants. Approximately 29% report using Facebook, 26% use LinkedIn, 21% use MySpace, 11% search blogs and 7% utilise Twitter. As Facebook is currently the most popular social media site, it is not surprising that American employers visit this site. Further, only 17% of employers consider this type of background check to be a violation of an applicant’s privacy. I am sure, now – five years later, the trend would have further amplified. Not only are employers frequently reading SNW profiles, they are using them to make hiring decisions. Almost 35% of US employers in one survey reported that they have found content on social networking sites that caused them not to hire an applicant. Rowell (2010) reports that 70% of HR managers say they have rejected a job applicant for his or her internet behaviour. There is an interesting incident I found in the literature, involving a 22-year-old Master’s degree holder from California. The student allegedly posted on her Twitter feed: “Cisco just offered me a job! Now I have to weigh the utility of a fatty paycheck against the daily commute to San Jose and hating the work.” A Cisco employee saw the tweet and responded by asking who the hiring manager was. The exchange attracted commentary from others; the student ultimately turned down the job, perhaps because she believed that Cisco would have withdrawn the offer anyway. It is apparent that checking social media sites is a part of the hiring process for many employers and is becoming an increasingly used avenue to hire – or reject – applicants. Relevance to Sri Lanka We have seen the media reports of the good, bad and ugly use of Facebook in Sri Lanka. Some teenagers come home, go straight to their rooms and get connected with Facebook friends without even showing their faces to the parents. With the presence of more than three million Sri Lankan internet users, the increasing trend of using SNWs for multiple purposes is obvious. With regard to the corporate sector, the use of SNWs for hiring is also coming to the forefront. Based on one of my ongoing research related to Sri Lanka, several key IT firms have benefitted from SNW-based hiring. However, it might not appeal to traditionalists who prefer formality and face-to-face meetings as opposed to Facebook chatting, and they may also highlight the policy issues and procedural inadequacies. Yet, the fact remains that the emerging workforce is more tech-savvy and internet-friendly. Luring talent through SNWs is handy in such a context. The rising popularity of the use of the internet for socially-critical events such as the releasing of exam results and the introduction of utility payment gateways is a sign that Sri Lankan HR professionals too should get their act together in moving into e-hiring. SNWs could be a significant source for such an endeavour. Way forward We have seen the shining shape of SNWs so far. What are the promises and pitfalls of hiring talent through SNWs? Are we really ready for it? What precautions one must take to mitigate risks associated? The next column of Humane Results will discuss these further. (Dr. Ajantha Dharmasiri works at the Postgraduate Institute of Management. He can be reached on [email protected] or www.ajanthadharmasiri.info.)

Luring talent through social media

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