Utilization of Social Media for Recruitment in Small Boutique Hotels of Australia

Running head: RESEARCH REPORT
Research Report
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Abstract
Recent studies have confirmed that the social networks have been the emergent agent for the
recruiters for the hospitality industry of Australia. Numerous research works have been
conducted regarding why and how the HR recruiters have successfully registered with the
social networking websites and used them for facilitating their recruitment process. This
research emphasizes to rediscover how the recruiters of the small boutique hotels of the
competitive hospitality sector of Australia have taken the trend of online recruitment to much
greater heights. Investment of limited endeavour and resources is the key to the social
recruitment process. A detailed literature review have been conducted in this report in order
to find out whether elements like corporate reputation of professional social media sites and
the global communicability that these sites induce, can draw benefits in favour of potential
small recruiters and potential job applicants. The researcher has pertained to empirical data
survey to realise and highlight the various aspects nod social media marketing. The empirical
findings have been explored through a detailed and illustrative analysis to reflect the major
findings regarding social media recruitment tool and its use by the small boutique hotels of
Australia. Real time nstatist6icalb data from the empirical researches have been utilised in
this report to reflect the avenues in which the social networking sites attract job applicants for
potential employers.

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Table of Contents
1. Introduction............................................................................................................................3
2. Literature Review...................................................................................................................4
2.1 Human Resourcing procedure..........................................................................................5
2.2 Social Media in recruitment.............................................................................................6
2.3 SNS Quality......................................................................................................................7
2.4 Perception regarding Corporate Reputation.....................................................................8
3. Methodology..........................................................................................................................9
4. Discussion............................................................................................................................11
4.1 Popularity of social media and attitudes of various groups............................................11
4.2 Differentiating Personal Networks from Professional networks....................................13
4.3 The appetite for using social media ion the recruitment process...................................14
4.4 Trend of using social media among the job seekers for searching potential recruiters..15
4.5 Role of networking groups in dedicated professional websites.....................................16
4.6 Applications of social media websites for professional services in the recruitment
process..................................................................................................................................17
5. Conclusion and recommendations.......................................................................................19
Reference List..........................................................................................................................22

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1. Introduction
The utilisation of Social Networking websites for the purpose of pre-employment
procedures of screening as well as selection have become commonplace and quite popular in
Australia. According to current statistical outcomes, one among every four adults in Australia
are account holders of Facebook or any similar Social networking website. Hence, the
popularisation of the intervention of social media in recruitment practices of hotels are not
arbitrary.
Problem Statement: It is debatable whether the use of social media is a practically
plausible and standard medium for screening and selection of new staff or not.
This report seeks to identify and establish the feasibilities of using social media for
the aforementioned process and allied practices and also aims at analysing the strategic
paucities for implementing the use of social media in the process. The social platforms might
turn out to be reliable and trustworthy sources of information about the applications for HR
selection. The boutique hotels of the competitive hospitality industry of Australia might use
social media for their recruitment processes. This would curtail their financial drain outs and
ensure operational ease. However, potential risks like legal and ethical considerations are
there. That is the reason why, there are contradictory opinions about the plausibility of using
social media in the recruitment process of hotels among the employees as well as the
employers operating under the legal standards of Australia. In order to shed light on the
conceptualisations concerning recruitment via social media, the definition of “recruitment”
and also that of “social media” as put forward by Gibbs, MacDonald and MacKay (2015),
can be highlighted. Recruitment can be looked upon as an enormous approach of human
resource management by virtue of 3whicvh the employers of any organisation engages in
seeking the right talent and thereby stimulating the same people for applying to work in the

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organisation. Recruitment using social media can be defined as a process of collecting
adequate information about the respective personnel identified as the possessor of requite
talent for becoming an employee of the organisation and analysing whether the individual
fulfils the requirements as per the staffing agendas of the company. The boutique hotels often
utilise resources like social media for identification of large number of capable candidates, so
that they can employ the most deserving candidate easily and flawlessly. In the words of
Ladkin and Buhalis (2016), social media in the context of being a resource to the recruitment
process, can be defined as the references to the website that helps virtual communities of job
seekers and mass recruiters to share and exchange information of mutual benefits. In this
report, the various ways in which frontline social platforms like Facebook, Bloggr,
Wordpress, LinkedIn, Google+, or Twitter are exploited by the employers of the hospitality
industry of Australia have been explored and analysed. SMEs like Boutique hotels providing
luxury service to the customers have lesser resources and inadequate time for focusing on the
recruitment process. Moreover, operating in the competitive environment of the hospitality
market in Sydney, the small luxury boutique hotels are twined in their day-to-day operations.
Evidently their spot operations like recruitment are loosely organised. Hence, social
platforms are the ideal place for them to communicate with potential candidates. However,
according to Michopoulou and Moisa (2018), the potential candidates are in the follow up of
big hospitality brands’ employment drives and to them these SME hotels might seem less
glamorous and less attractive. Such issues are discussed in detail in the literature review
section of the report. A detailed analysis of the issues that the boutique hotels face owing to
these circumstances have been done in the discussion section of the report. The concluding
section makes valuable recommendations regarding HR practices that suits the SME hotels
with limited resources and makes them liable to use social media as an important resource for
the staff recruitment process.

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2. Literature Review
2.1 Human Resourcing procedure
The procedure of recruitment is one of the primary tasks of Human Resource
Management. Particularly, the small Boutique hotels of Australia should necessarily attract
end give placement to the best candidates. Nieves & Quintana (2018), argues that this is the
only way by which the performance of the workforce of the organisation would elevate and
the boutique hotel can gradually earn brand loyalty. On the contrary, El Ouirdi et al. (2016),
opines that each hotel is different in their presentation and their work methodologies, and
accordingly t6eir staffing needs are different. Hence, the kind and qualification required in
employees of the hotels also vary. Hence, it is essential that in order to fulfil the objectives of
requirement, the methods as well as the sources of requirement must be tailored. In this
context, the requirement sources are external environments like universities from where the
viable candidates are spotted. These sources can be other organisations (employees of other
Boutique hotels of Sydney, in this context) also. Again, the popular recruitment methods are
online recruitment, job fairs or newspaper advertisements for vacancies and also employee
vacancies. In the competitive hospitality industry and knowledge based economies of
Australia, the Boutique hotels can easily acquire technological innovations and best-in-class
physical resources. However, Madera et al. (2017), is of the opinion that getting hold of the
right human resources is the most difficult part of the set up. The lack of proper human
resources results in the misuse of the other physical and technological resources and as a
result the turnover cost rises sharply. In the words of Rowley, Shipilov and Greve (2017), the
effectiveness if the recruitment process also impacts the quality of the organisational
performance. Other researchers have also opined in the same line. They have agreed that
selection of correct employees always gives a competitive advantage to the hotels.