Impact of Social Media on the recruitment
To say Social Media is not impacting or making a huge dent in the recruitment behaviours of prospective candidates and companies are both rather too extreme statements.
The reality is both candidates and companies are using social media differently.
The genuine job seeker are really cautious of what they put in the online space, fearing ..yes fearing the prospective employer would judge them for what they do in their own private time and their chances of landing a dream job may be effected.
Employers are looking at the online profile of the final few candidates and screening them for profile and behaviour prior to approaching them for an interview. They are doing so primarily from a 'fitting in' perspective than anything else. They however are spending more time online using social media to promote their company brand and profile in the hope of attracting the ​young highly mobile elusive employee. Using all tricks of images of staff party and picnics, "fun" and "exciting" photographs and videos to show they are not as crusty and hard nose business corporate outfit as they are made out to be and hoping they get the much coveted " employer of choice" award.
Social media is here to stay at least till the next best thing to beat that appears.
LinkedIn is the most active job seeker and seeking business tool. It is helping employee approach the final recruiting destination without the fear of rejection. In the past they were at the mercy of the gatekeepers of the HR - recruitment bias and in most cases never got the opportunity to present themselves without the reference of the recruitment agency or a referee who may agree to recommend them. Now they identify the prospective company and the key decision makers and send them a link of their profile with a message of their desire to work with them. The decision maker gets to review the profile and makes the call quickly.
Facebook is primarily been used to promote a company profile. It informs and attracts prospect employee with information but they still have to use the official channels to put forward their application. Yes it does have links to the web site where they can apply for the job but that’s not a replacement of any previously used process or system, just a additional avenue to scope new candidates.
Twitter is seen more as an announcement platform used in promotion of the event like a job fair. It’s an easy niched medium to inform a large group of similar minded individuals within a defined location or region. But again more it is a advertisement tool for sourcing rather than shortlisting and screening a candidate database.
Google+ is yet to forge a defined space in the job search or recruitment space, but with google you never know what might happen.
It all sounds so simple, easy and straight forward, then how come it has not make the recruiting desk of a company or the recruitment agency redundant.
The answer is "Time, supply and demand".
There are some roles where there is no right candidate in sight - the skill shortage candidate, the employer is chasing the candidate but he does not want to play ball. Or there are roles where there are so many candidates that the inbox gets inundated with so many "inquiries" that the decision maker just finds it impossible to make the time to screen the candidates. In both cases, the decision makers looks for the recruitment skill specialist to do the job for him. And in today’s world it’s the recruitment agency or the HR Desk within the company.
So then where we on the Social Media debate. Social media like todays big data issues has make the process faster, sharper and quicker but has also added the element of size. You can now reach greater locations and time zones making the need of screen & finalise a candidate ever more critical. How much ever quicker, elaborate and automated maybe the sourcing process the final decision in our busy lives is taken by a real live person.
Everyone now has more to do with all the information at our finger tips that the organisations structures are not becoming smaller but smarter. So the Social media is a tool and nothing more in our effort to find the best candidate and the method to land ourselves the dream role.
