Social Media and Recruitment

Social Media and Recruitment

Introduction

Gone are the days, where recruitment was a time-consuming, complex, and localized process. With the advent of social media, the recruitment process has been improvised immensely. However, does it pose a risk to the traditional way of recruitment? Is social media a threat to recruitment agencies and the professionals associated with it? Do the social media really serve the purpose of hiring a deserving candidate? Answer is certainly not that simple and requires a holistic view of the subject. Let’s take a high level overview and understand the nitty-gritty surrounding the subject.

Advantages of Social Media for Recruitment

The passive approach of engaging a recruitment consultancy or posting an ad on newspaper, company’s website to scan the deserving candidates is fading now. Following are some of the key advantages of social media in recruitment:

• Efficient delivery – Social media is the globally accepted tool to scan the employer as well as employees to fasten the overall recruitment process.
• Employer Branding – Social media is widely used by the companies to propagate and attract talent and future prospects.
• Budget and cost – Adopting social media can add value to sustainable savings for the company.

Disadvantages of Social Media for Recruitment

Although social media helps the employers and candidates to get the desired results, following alarming aspects must be considered:

• Diversity of social media – adoption of social media must be used carefully along with the traditional search medium to identify the right talent.
• Discrimination – Candidate’s assessment exclusively on the basis of online profiles can elevate the risk of unethical practices.
• Evaluation – Online profiles may not necessarily provide the right information about the job seekers.
• Employer Branding – sharing the right message across social media is of a vital importance as candidates scan minute details before applying.

Social Media and Recruitment – In a Nutshell

Social media is certainly progressing aggressively to capture and enhance the recruitment world in today’s era. Following figures indicate a strong hold of social media in recruitment arena:

• There are over 20 million professionals on LinkedIn across Europe and the network has over 85 million members worldwide.
• 80% of companies use social media for recruitment and 95% using LinkedIn for the same.
• Facebook reached 1.11 billion users in the world as of May 2, 2013 (Reference: Wikipedia), of which 50% log into the site everyday.

Social media and recruitment needs a symbiotic relationship to accelerate and enhance the overall recruitment process. Recruitment agencies can play a big role through adopting the new medium, improving recruiter’s skill sets, and providing profound trainings on big social mediums such as Linkedin, Facebook, Viadeo etc. Professionals engaged in traditional recruitment process shall abreast the latest technologies and social media to retain a positive hold.

Undoubtedly, social media helped in making the recruitment process more efficient, transparent, global, and open; an individual’s strength and capabilities can only be scrutinized through personal interaction. Hence, a complete transformation of traditional methods to social media seems unlikely in the near future.