Social Media Recruitment: Opportunities and Challenges

The use of social media in recruitment processes has both benefits and drawbacks. On one hand, it allows for cost-effective communication with a large audience, efficient filtering and screening of candidates, and simplification of tasks like manual screening. However, it also poses risks such as data falsification or inaccuracies, negative brand image, and legal concerns regarding privacy issues. Furthermore, social media can provide information on race, gender, religion, and personal views, which may lead to unconscious biases in the recruitment process. To overcome these challenges, organizations are recommended to adopt social media for recruitment but support it with automated big data analytical tools to ensure more efficient and effective use.

Running Head: SOCIAL MEDIA IS AN EFFECTIVE TOOL FOR RECRUITMENT. 1
SOCIAL MEDIA IS AN EFFECTIVE TOOL FOR RECRUITMENT.

SOCIAL MEDIA IS AN EFFECTIVE TOOL FOR RECRUITMENT. 2
Table of Contents
Introduction......................................................................................................................................3
Social Media....................................................................................................................................3
Recruitment......................................................................................................................................4
Benefits and statistics......................................................................................................................5
Example.......................................................................................................................................8
Challenges........................................................................................................................................8
Recommendations............................................................................................................................9
Conclusion.....................................................................................................................................10
References......................................................................................................................................10

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Introduction
Social media has emerged as one of the most powerful platforms for communication across the
globe. Millions of people use various social media platforms for various purposes like
communication, chatting, advertisements etc. Social media platforms provide fast and efficient
tools which make the information be available at any time and accessible from anywhere. Seeing
the large number of users available through social media platform, this platform has emerged as
a powerful tool for recruitment of human resource for organizations. Many organizations have
started to use online recruitment and social media-based recruitment as an effective and efficient
form of recruitment strategy. This work examines the effectiveness of the social media as a tool
for recruitment.
Social Media
Social media is a computer application which supports communication in the form of textual,
audio, video data formats through the internet medium. Through social media platforms, users
can post their ideas, can share their ideas and files, and can get thelatest information related to
any subject. Social media can be in the form of blogs, specialized business networks, product
review sites, microblogging sites, social gaming sites all with specific purposes. Each user has to
make a user profile on these social media platform and start the communication. Over the years
many social media platforms have emerged as apowerful tool for communication. Some of the
notable social media platforms are Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Snap chat, etc. The biggest
advantage a social media platform offers is that it has emerged as a powerful and cheapest form
of communication with large audiences at a single time. Thus, a single user can communicate his
or her ideas or messages to a large audience through this medium (Cain et al, 2010).

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Recruitment
The recruitment process is a process of finding the best candidate for the job opening in the
organization and hiring the best-qualified candidate for the open position in the organization.
Thus in the recruitment process, prospective employees are searched and are encouraged to apply
for the job opening in the organization. The aim is to hire qualified employees to facilitate
efficient working force for the organization. In the traditional form of recruitment process i.e. the
offline mode of recruitment, the companies post advertisements of the job openings on various
communication platforms like websites, newspapers, employee exchange offices etc. The
candidates who are interested in the job positions apply for the jobs by submitting their resumes.
The company HR manager then filters the resumes on the basis of qualification and selection
criteria and then executes other processes like aninterview, group discussion etc. This mode of
recruitment is very challenging. It requires a lot of time and manpower to execute the tasks of the
offline recruitmentprocess (Culnan et al, 2010). Moreover, the company HR manager doesn’t
have any priorknowledge related to the employee profession and gains all the insights about the
candidate via the resume submitted. Also, communication to the audience is limited in this mode
of recruitment as few of the candidates are able to get information regarding job openings on
time. Thus, over the years of development companies have adopted a new form of recruitment
system the online recruitment system. In this system, the company maintains an online platform
for advertisement, for resume submission, filtering of resume etc. The online mode offers fast
and efficient recruitment process as much information system can filter required keywords from
large documents at a single time. In this mode, even the candidate can monitor the status of the
application and thus can be acknowledged easily. This enhances the transparency of the overall
recruitment process. But still communicating in this form of recruitment is limited as the

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candidate has to regularly visit the organization website to get information regarding job
openings etc. Moreover, the HR of the organization still doesn’t have aproper idea to where to
target for recruitment to get potential candidates efficiently. Social media platform based
recruitment provides all these facilities from one single platform. Hence it has becomean
important strategy for recruitment.
Benefits and statistics
Social media is a powerful recruitment strategy because it offers multiple advantages to the
organization in terms of recruitment. These are as follows:
a. It provides large audience connectivity: The number of users using social media sites has
increased over the years and is around 2.46 billion in 2017. This trend is expected to
grow and reach a mark of 3 billion by 2021. Thus, the social media platform offers large
audience connectivity. Figure 1: shows the number of users using social media (Jones et
al. , 2014)
Figure 1: Number of users of Social Media platform across the globe.

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b. Quick sharing of information: Through social media platform the information related to
thejob can be easily shared witha large number of audience instantly. The organization
has to just post an informative share on the job opening on its social media webpage and
this information can be shared to all the connected profiles at a single click (Khatri et al,
2015).
c. Provide referrals: Employee referrals are an important source of providing agood
candidate for the organization. Through social media, the employees can reach out to
their known friends and post jobs and provide key referrals for the organization. In this
way, the organization gets potential good candidates for the job openings (King et al,
2015).
d. Building a brand: Through social media, it is very easy to build a trusted relationship and
brand image. The companies can develop good relationships with the potential employees
before even posting the jobs. Through social media presence, the company can create a
brand image of the company ideas, environment and promote its vision etc. and thus with
regular updates of happenings the company can create a huge positive influence on
people connected to the webpage. In this way, they can attract many potential candidates
and thus can cultivate a brand image along with a good trusted relationship (Khatri et al,
2015).
e. Targeting right candidate become easier: Through social media pages, the organization
can get ideas on the loyal customers, users who like the organization by their likes and
visits. With the help of big data tools the company getsanalyses the profiles of the people
who like their webpage or visit their webpage and thus can get the basic idea of the user
preferences and qualifications. In this way, it becomes easier to make a target audience

SOCIAL MEDIA IS AN EFFECTIVE TOOL FOR RECRUITMENT. 7
for a specific job opening easily. Moreover, through social media pages, the company can
also get agood amount of information about the candidate who has shown interest in their
jobs. This can help them in screening the good candidate faster (Jones et al. , 2014)
f. Among the job seekers, it is found that LinkedIn platform is the most important social
media platform for helping online social media-based recruitment for the organization. It
provides agood amount of information to the organization regarding the candidate profile,
interests, and qualifications. It is followed by Facebook and Twitter (Jones et al. , 2014)
g. It makes theselection process easier. Through social media recruitment, the selection
process can become interesting, easier and automatic in nature. With various forms of
analytical tools supported with the social media platform, the company can select
interested keywords from a pool of users connected to the webpage and thus can filter
quickly. With further automation of the process, the company can do the recruitment
process in quick and easier manner (Nikolaou, 2014).
h. It saves money: The social media-basedrecruitment makes use of internet-basedwebpages
for communication of job-related data, for selecting, for filtering and for the entire
recruitment process. The internet-based web technology has a large number of users and
is very cheaper when compared to other forms of advertisements like anewspaper,
billboards, employment exchanges, consultancy etc. Thus the recruitment process using
social media is cheaper when compared to other modes of hiring and selection (Nikolaou,
2014).
i. Through social media recruitment, it becomes easier for theorganization to hire
candidates who are residing abroad. Companies need good minds and thus are open to
includingcandidates from other countries. Through social media platforms, the company

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gets a global platform to communicate their messages and thus can attract
potentialcandidatesfrom abroad to work in the organization (Nikolaou, 2014).
Example
Over the years many companies prefer to adopt social media recruitment strategy due to cheaper
cost and effective recruitment strategy. It is evident from figure 2 below (Razmerita, et al, 2014).
Figure 2: Companies using social media to recruit.
Companies like UPS and Zippos’ have astrong online presence and thus have webpages on
platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn along with Google+ and Pinterest. This has
helped these organizations to attract new candidates for jobs due to efficient communication
reachability and recruit good candidates for the organization.
Challenges
Various forms of risks are associated with social media-basedrecruitment. Some of them are as
follows:

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a. Data may be inaccurate. Many people opt to have differences in their professional and
personal lives and thus do not provide accurate information on the social media
platforms. It is also possible that the entire information may be falsified or some part of it
may be falsified or some part may be inaccurate. Screening and searching these fake or
inaccurate profiles is time-consuming and wastage of exercise (Roth et al, 2016).
b. Through social media, it is easier to post negative comments or reviews or unsatisfactory
messages on the social media webpage and this may cause thenegative brand image of
the organization or the candidate. In some cases, some unhappy employees may post
messages which may give anegativebrand image for the organization and thus may affect
recruitment process (Wagner et al., 2014).
c. Using social media platform impose legal implications and concerns for privacy issues. It
is essential to ensure that privacy of data is preserved or else it may cause legal actions to
be taken upon (Stoughton et al, 2014).
d. Using social media platform it is easier to gain some information on race, gender, religion
and personal views. It is quite possible that through this information the organization may
filter the candidates on the basis of race, gender, religionetc. And thus may not
incorporate diversity at theworkplace.
Recommendations
From the above analysis, it can thus be stated that organizationgets huge benefits while using
social media as a toolfor recruitment especially in terms of communicating directly to large
audiences in reduced operational costs of recruitment. It is thus, recommended that companies
should adopt this tool for recruitment process but it must be supported with other automated big
dataanalytical tools so that they can use this technology in more efficient and effective manner.

SOCIAL MEDIA IS AN EFFECTIVE TOOL FOR RECRUITMENT. 10
In this way, the organization can get more details on the correct talent and thus can focus more
on their potential candidates.
Conclusion
Social media is a powerful tool for communicatingwith the large number of audiencesacross the
globe. It is possible to create personal and business network using social media platforms. Thus,
it has been slowly integrated as an efficient and important tool for the recruitment process in
much organization. In this organization, it has proven to provide good and talent candidates for
the job openings. It has proven to be a very cost-effective tool for recruitment and simplifies
various tasks like filtering, manual screening etc. But it is associated with risks of data and
privacy issues. It is thus required that companies while following legal implication make use of
this effective tool as a part of their recruitment process to get talented candidates for the
workforce in their organization.
References
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for resident selection. American Journal of Health-System Pharmacy, 67.
Culnan, M. J., McHugh, P. J., & Zubillaga, J. I. (2010). How large US companies can use
Twitter and other social media to gain business value. MIS Quarterly Executive, 9(4).
Jones, D. A., Willness, C. R., & Madey, S. (2014). Why are job seekers attracted by corporate
social performance? Experimental and field tests of three signal-based
mechanisms. Academy of Management Journal, 57(2), 383-404.

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Khatri, C., Chapman, S. J., Glasbey, J., Kelly, M., Nepogodiev, D., Bhangu, A., ... & STARSurg
Committee. (2015). Social media and internet driven study recruitment: evaluating a new
model for promoting collaborator engagement and participation. PLoS One, 10(3),
e0118899.
King, D. B., O’rourke, N., & DeLongis, A. (2014). Social media recruitment and online data
collection: A beginner’s guide and best practices for accessing low-prevalence and hard-
to-reach populations. Canadian Psychology/Psychologie Canadienne, 55(4), 240.
Nikolaou, I. (2014). Social networking websites in job search and employee
recruitment. International Journal of Selection and Assessment, 22(2), 179-189.
Razmerita, L., Kirchner, K., & Nabeth, T. (2014). Social media in organizations: leveraging
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Electronic Commerce, 24(1), 74-93.
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.
Stoughton, J. W., Thompson, L. F., & Meade, A. W. (2015). Examining applicant reactions to
the use of social networking websites in pre-employment screening. Journal of Business
and Psychology, 30(1), 73-88.
Wagner, D., Vollmar, G., & Wagner, H. T. (2014). The impact of information technology on
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