Social Networking and Hiring
Introduction
The use of social networks to hire individuals has become a common practice for many organizations and enterprises. With the massive development in the field of technology in term of hardware and software and the information technology industry comes the advancement in communication. The use of social networks is established now more than ever.
Social Network Trends
There are a few social networks which don't change a lot from year-to-year but still remain at the top of the list. The popular social media platforms have huge variability in terms of customer usage by geography and demography. This means that there are countries known for their use of a particular social media site and the age groups which use the various sites also vary. This fact has enabled the different social media developers to target a specific group as their audience in various ways such as social marketing (Davison et.al. 2016).
Employers should, therefore, be informed on which social networks to use when looking for people of a particular age or specific expertise. The most popular social networks used for business purposes by organizations include Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Skype. They are powerful tools in communication and information (Drouin et.al. 2015).
Social Network Sites Usage
Despite the statistics presented by the global social media research summary of 2019 where 56% of the American population own an account in one of the many social media networks, popularity of usage in this context is to be measured by the number of active account usage, and not the actual number of user accounts as there are instances of dormant accounts and users with multiple accounts. For this reason, some top social networks have stopped to grow at the foreseen rate while some networks are growing more rapidly than others (Van et.al. 2016). Employers should identify the platforms which have promising prospects and which are fast becoming popular with the profession which they are targeting.
Use of Social Media in Business
Pew Research Center in their documentation of the use of social media as a means of communication refers to research that found that 91% of people who own phones in the United States use social networks frequently to connect to their families, friends and business associates. Therefore, the use of social media is becoming popular not only for use by friends but also by corporations, organizations and major businesses (Roth et.al. 2016).
Hiring using Social Media
This use of social media in business should be done with close monitoring for the information provided by individuals on social networks can be misleading due to the lack of a legal process of verification. For instance, the social media platform Facebook allows subscribers to choose their usernames. A person may choose a name that is not their own or even go to their profiles and update that they have graduated from a reputable university with first class honours in a professional course when they have no such qualifications. If an organization goes in to select this individual for the purpose of hiring them, they will be disappointed by the inefficiency of such individuals (Drouin et.al. 2015).
It is common knowledge that many people have become deceitful on these sites. Therefore, if a company is considering to hire individuals on social media, they should know that the details provided on social media are not to be taken as gospel truth and further probing and interviews should be applied as the primary test of competency. In saying so, we should remember that not all information on social media is wrong, employers should use the information sparingly and with caution to know more about their prospective employees. In other terms, social media should work as a supplement for formal job interviews (Melanthiou et.al. 2015).
Apart from providing information social media platforms have been of immense help in facilitating communication even between job seekers and the employer. For instance, a person who wishes to work for a multinational corporation whose headquarters are overseas may be interviewed online by use of the real-time video conferencing applications such as Skype. This is a very revolutionary development in the social network sector. If this can be adopted fully even for internal operations, business enterprises will be running more efficiently (Roth et.al. 2016).
Conclusion
The digital era has become with so many benefits in terms of improvements in communication and information technology. However, these benefits have been marred by some disadvantages such as fallacies on social networks which can mislead the audience. Therefore, employers should be very keen when looking for more information about their prospective employees. The effort should, in fact, be complementary. Prospective employees should strive to provide relevant, resourceful and honest information for ease of use by potential employers. This should be done without compromising their security. All in all, social media has had more good than bad in the corporate world.
References
Davison, H. K., Bing, M. N., Kluemper, D. H., & Roth, P. L. (2016). Social media as a personnel selection and hiring resource: Reservations and recommendations. Social media in employee selection and recruitment (pp. 15-42). Springer, Cham.
Drouin, M., O’Connor, K. W., Schmidt, G. B., & Miller, D. A. (2015). Facebook fired: Legal perspectives and young adults’ opinions on the use of social media in hiring and firing decisions. Computers in Human Behavior, 46, 123-128.
Melanthiou, Y., Pavlou, F., & Constantinou, E. (2015). The use of social network sites as an e-recruitment tool. Journal of Transnational Management, 20(1), 31-49.
Roth, P. L., Bobko, P., Van Iddekinge, C. H., & Thatcher, J. B. (2016). Social media in employee-selection-related decisions: A research agenda for uncharted territory. Journal of Management, 42(1), 269-298.
Van Iddekinge, C. H., Lanivich, S. E., Roth, P. L., & Junco, E. (2016). Social media for selection? Validity and adverse impact potential of a Facebook-based assessment. Journal of Management, 42(7), 1811-1835.