Social Media Technologies: Advantages and Disadvantages in Recruitment

This article discusses the advantages and disadvantages of social media technologies in recruitment. It covers the different types of social media platforms and how they can be used for recruitment purposes. It also talks about the benefits of online interviewing and screening of candidates. The article concludes with the advantages of pursuing social recruitment and how it can help in reducing hiring time and costs.

Social Media Technologies

Contents
Introduction................................................................................................................................3
Focus and Purpose......................................................................................................................3
Overview of Social media..........................................................................................................4
Advantages in Recruitment via social media.............................................................................5
Disadvantages of Social media..................................................................................................6
Choice of choosing jobs from a variety of Options...................................................................6
Advantages of Online Interviewing during selection of candidates..........................................7
Screening of Candidates and Employees...................................................................................8
Social recruitment shortens hiring time and costs......................................................................8
Pursuing social recruitment and its advantages.........................................................................9
Conclusion..................................................................................................................................9
References................................................................................................................................10

Introduction
Social media technologies are a combination of applications and websites that enable its users
to create innovative and meaningful content that can be shared on these platforms with other
users. This process of creating content and sharing it is usually referred to as Social Media
Networking (Lenhart, et al., 2015). These contents and information can take many forms
such as blogs, news forums, business networks, products and services reviews, micro blogs,
photo and video sharing.
Focus and Purpose
Each and every social media platform is different from one another and all their functions
vary from one platform to another. There are multiple platform available in the market. This
is how they differ from one another. With competition on the rise it is very tough for the
employers to choose and recruit the desired potential candidates and employees for their
companies (Della and Mattoni, 2015). The typical recruitment process of sourcing and hiring
employees through numerous job portal and other recruitment tools can be very time
consuming and costly. Here social media networking platforms come to their rescue and
plays an important role when it comes to recruiting the best of candidates.
Overview of Social media
● Social Networking: As the name suggests, networking refers to those websites and
applications that help connect its users to communicate formally or informally with their
friends, families and other people directly through groups and networks from any desired
location from around the world. Example- Face book, Google+, LinkedIn
● Micro blogging: Micro blogging refers to those particular social networking sites where
users can post minimalistic piece of information, news or updates of any kind for other
people to see and reply with direct messages publicly. On this platform, users can subscribe
to view other users’ content to review, share and even create new and meaningful content
using hash tags. Example is Twitter & Tumbler (Trainor, et al., 2014).

● Blogging: Blogging websites are usually personal websites where users can create and
share real stories, educational information, world news, learning and informative articles and
also share links of other related websites. Example, Word Press, Blogger
●Photo Sharing: These social networking websites and applications enable its users to
publish and their digital photos with other users either publicly or privately on this digital
forum. Example is Instagram, Flickr and Pinterest (Fulk and Connie Yuan, 2017).
●Video Sharing: Video sharing websites and application allow its users to embed their
media in the form of videos, music videos, movies and post them for public viewing on these
platforms. Example is YouTube and Vimeo (Finch, et al., 2016).
Advantages in Recruitment via social media
Social media platforms have proven to be the greatest tool for recruitment purposes. With the
growing popularity of social media platforms like Twitter, Face book and LinkedIn, a large
number of human resource professionals and recruiters are utilizing these platforms for
recruitment and advertising purposes. It is a great way of showcasing the brand value and
image of the companies by directly communicating with the potential candidates and
informing them about the ongoing vacancies. Social media tools can be used to access
candidates’ skills, personal qualities along with their previous experience. The mission of
using the social media tools is to provide employers with an effective employment network
that is cost effective and can reach an ethnically diverse national and international workforce
of active candidates. Social media networking is considered to be the worlds’ largest
professional network with over 150 million members across 200 countries and territories

combined. A recent study shows that through social media platforms over 1 million links are
shared in every 20 seconds and 10-11 social media accounts are opened ever second.
Both active and passive job seekers usually use a company’s social media page to search and
look for jobs posted. The growing availability of high speed internet access has added to the
popularity of social media platforms where users can create web-based profiles and engage in
conversations directly with the recruiters.
This process of recruiting with the help of social media platforms is known as Social
Recruiting or social media recruitment.
 Social media platforms have a larger pool of potential candidates and employees.
 Candidate experiences can be enhanced through direct communication.
 There is a huge access to hidden candidates.
 Job visibility increases through ease of sharing and networking
 The best of candidates can be filtered with the help of access to more information in
lesser time.
 Advertising and other overhead costs can be saved by the employers.
 Databases of employees and candidates are more compared to the traditional
recruitment process.
● Social Medias spread any news about jobs on digital social platforms like wild fire,
informing more and more people and the response rate is much higher than the other
traditional processes.
 Social Media can engage passive candidates and employees who rarely visit online
job portals or other recruitment agencies.
 There is lot of employer transparency and employers can directly engage in
conversations with potential customers, prominent suppliers, internal and external
shareholders.
 There is easy access and direct possible networking with industry leaders.
 A wider range of passive audiences can be reached while engaging in conversations
on various recruitment topics.
 Employees can be searched and found.
 Organisation scan be acknowledged through references(Kim. and Hastak, 2018)

 Employers can become a part of an online forum to share information and easily
recruit.
Disadvantages of Social media
 Employers can be biased towards candidates with good social media presence.
 Candidates may display inaccurate information.
 All people on social media do not want their profiles to be viewed by employers
because they want to keep their information private.
 Information which is not permitted to be used in the hiring decision.
 Potential violations of state and federal laws related to background checks.
 Potential failure to hire or discriminate claim.
 Inconsistent usage.
Choice of choosing jobs from a variety of Options
Job seekers no longer follow the traditional ways of job searching. They simply create their
digital profiles along with their resumes on numerous job portals to be viewed by end number
of employers, which is not only hassle free but also time saving because the options are many
(Cook, 2017). Example is Linkin.
Advantages of Online Interviewing during selection of candidates
Social media is known for its source of generating high quality referrals and hence the
recruitment process through these platforms is easy, engaging and less time taking. With
most of the enterprises going global most of the companies want to diminish their marginal as
well as over-head costs when it comes to recruiting employees, by adopting a friendly
approach to select candidates through virtual or video interviewing techniques (Gehl, 2014).
Virtual interviewing is not just cost effective but also less time taking that in a way improves
the quality of hire. Video interviews relieve the stress of the tradition hiring process as it
allows the applicants to respond to the recruiters’ questions as per their convenience. A large
number of candidates can easily be screened instead of the face-to-face interviews that are
sometimes not as fruitful. The interview video can be kept for later use to compare and screen
the best of the candidates at a later time. Pre-determined questions can be set for interviewing
to main consistency (White, 2016). The reliability with which information can be obtained
from websites and the validity of those information can and should be established.

A recent survey shows that applicants’ profiles may enhance their chances of being hired or
selected based on the supportive evidence of their listed experiences. Potential employees
may have access to detailed information that would allow them to draw conclusions or make
inferences about the characteristics and personality of the applicant that might not be
obtained through the traditional ways of recruitment. Social networking sites can be seen as
tools to screen out the profiles of job seekers in the selection processes and this could have a
positive or negative effect on the job applicants depending on the content of a social
networking profile. The use of social networking sites for recruiting seems to be vividly
accepted because of its close relation to the advertising of the jobs.
Advantages of Video Interviewing are as follows:
 It speeds up the interview process
 The quality of hire is improved
 The best candidates can easily be identified.
 Candidates engagement with the respective organisation or brands can be improved
 The number of candidates who do not show up can be reduced.
 Time will not be wasted in interviewing the unsuitable candidates
 Time will not be wasted in scheduling interviews or meetings
 Answer of Candidates can be compared and reviewed at a later time.
 Geographical constrains are faced no more.
 Candidates can save on the travel cost.
Screening of Candidates and Employees
Employees are the main pillars of any organisation and it cannot run without the proper
functioning of its human resources (Obar and Wildman, 2015). Hence hiring the best
employees is an important function that broadly involves two main activities:
●Hiring
●Selection
The basic purpose of recruitment is to provide a range of potentially bright and qualifies
candidates through extensive screening and comparing the prospective applicants (Munar
and Jacobsen, 2014). Keeping in mind the present and the future requirements of the
organisation, the success rate of the selection process of the candidates can be increased by
reducing the number of less or under-qualified job applicants and job seekers (Ngai, Tao and
Moon, 2015). Hence it is of utmost importance to identify and prepare the right applicants

through certain screening and selection processes. This will help to increase the effectiveness
and function ability of the applicants in the long run. With a wide range of applicants the
selection process of the right candidates becomes quite competitive which increases the
prospects of the best ones. Job dissatisfaction and fewer turnovers of employees could be a
result of wrong selection of candidates if allocated in wrong positions (Agnihotri, et al.,
2016). The effectiveness of the recruitment process can be enhanced once the applicants
understand the needs of the organisation.
Social recruitment shortens hiring time and costs
Most of the organisations these days use the following channels to hire employees during
vacancies.
●Printed media
●Local employment offices
●Hire internally
●Temporary recruitment agencies
But all the above mentioned methods are age old methods of hiring through publishing that
take a lot of time to receive responses from the applicants. But Social Media Recruiting has
redefined these old methods and has transformed the way people communicate through
networking while looking for candidates during vacancies (Westin. and Ruebhausen, 2015).
Social media platforms can help advertise about job openings in a very less expensive and
less time consuming manner because it has become one of the worlds’ most popular forums
to inform and establish connections between people from anywhere in the world. The world
of recruitment has identified the fundamental importance of utilizing social media and has
begun to use social sites to look for top candidates (Wamba and Carter, 2016).
Pursuing social recruitment and its advantages
 Increased candidates in terms of quantity, quality and engagements
 Increased brand awareness
 Creates virility of job opportunity on social media platforms
 Decrease recruitment costs
 Decrease length of hire cycles and saves time

 Social media platforms enable prospective candidates to respond immediately through
numerous platforms and hence the vacant positions can be filled fast without wasting
much time that is usually required in the traditional hiring methods
Digital interviewing of candidates can not only lower recruitment costs but also
reduces the time-to-hire rates.
Conclusion
Social media sites have the distinct advantage of enabling companies to reinvent themselves
not only internally but also externally as a means of identifying and sourcing the best talent
through networking. One out of two companies post brand related content on social media to
be viewed by millions at once. Social media users and consumers are very open to co-
creation and structural collaboration with brands they happen to like on social media. The
social media addiction is bound to rise in the future due to its accessibility and affordability
and networking will be on a forever rise. New tools and websites are constantly being created
and job creations are increasing by the minute. Thus social media technologies and platforms
will open new horizons of opportunities for people all around the world in years to come and
it’s very important to make good use of these technologies and make them work in favour of
us.

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