Social Media

Title: Social Media and Recruitment in a Globalized Market

Name: Jignesh J Trivedi (MBA - HR)

(Asst. Professor, Shree B J Patel Umiya BBA College, A’bad)

Address: 15, Krishna Aprt;

Opp. Ami Akhand Anand society part-2;

B/H Ambica Hotel;

CTM Char Rasta;

Ahmedabad - 380026

Contact: 91-93772 51541

Email Id: jignesh_hrm@live.in

ABSTRACT

Title: Social Media and Recruitment in a Globalised Market

Social Media is identified as a “free participation that allows (communities) to get engaged and build genuine relationship”. This is a community of people with common interests who connect with one another to learn, play, work, organise and socialise. Not just friendships but professional relationships on a wider canvas have become easy to cultivate. Employers too find it convenient to use social media extensively for hiring purposes.
Recently, practitioners and researchers have been emphasizing the critical role of social media in the effective management of human resources. More specifically, the effectiveness of social media as a tool for recruiting human resources is being viewed as an innovative and effective method for searching and attracting talent. In the context of a globalised market, an emerging economy like India has left with no other option except leveraging social media for sourcing and attracting talent.

The proposed study aims at studying and understanding the role of social media as a tool for searching and attracting talents to the talent starved Indian industry. Further, attempt shall also been made to understand the issues and challenges faced both by the employers and potential employees of India for using social media. For this purpose, data and information is to be collected from multiple sources.

Recruitment and Social Media

Today, for most of us, social networking sites have become an integral part of our lives. They have opened new avenues to connect with people from all walks of life across the globe. Not just friendships but professional relationships on a wider canvas have become easy to cultivate.
Social networking sites are able to provide a method for recruiters to build two-way Communication and engage job candidates.

Recently, practitioners and researchers have been emphasizing the critical role of social media in the effective management of human resources. More specifically, the effectiveness of social media as a tool for recruiting human resources is being viewed as an innovative and effective method for searching and attracting talent. In the context of a globalised market, an emerging economy like India has left with no other option except leveraging social media for sourcing and attracting talent.

The proposed study aims at studying and understanding the role of social media as a tool for searching and attracting talents to the talent starved Indian industry. Further, attempt shall also been made to understand the issues and challenges faced both by the employers and potential employees of India for using social media. For this purpose, data and information is to be collected from multiple sources.

Social Media

Social media can be defined as "interactive platforms via which individuals and communities create and share user-generated content”. Narvey, (2009) defined Social Media as a “free participation that allows (communities) to get engaged and build genuine relationship”. Social media describes a new set of internet tools that enable shared community experiences, both online and in person. Boyd & Ellison, (2008) defined Social Media or Social Network Sites (SNSs) as “Web-based services that allow individuals to construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others with the system.” Social Media is a shift from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 which is essentially a movement towards dialogue, collaboration and sharing online versus the essentially one-way system of information gathering which previously existed on the Internet. Social Media is a community of people with common interests who connect with one another to learn, play, work, organise and socialise. Communities can be large or small, local or global. They can be public or restricted to members. Social media are social software which mediates human communication. Examples of social media include Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter, and Second Life. While there are design differences between these sites, the basic components are the same (Smith, 2010).

Recently, Several Indian and Multi National Corporation are also found to promote Social networking. For example, Infosys has launched ‘InfyBubble’ - a social networking platform for Infosys employees in May 2011 presently having 104,122 registered users with 398,248 connections established across the world with an average page view of 102,572. Tata Group’s social networking site ‘Ideamax’ lets everyone submit an idea, and everyone can comment on and vote on all of the ideas. IBM’s social networking site ‘Beehive’ helps employees make new connections, track current friends and coworkers, and renew contacts with people they have worked with in the past. At Colliers International Property Consultants Inc. in Seattle, a great deal of thought has been given to how these tools can support a five-year strategic plan to drive more revenue by becoming more collaborative, says Mindy Geisser, the company’s vice president for global HR.

Use of Social Media in Recruitment

The use of social media in recruitment is otherwise called as Social Recruiting. Metashift defines social recruiting as “simply using social channels to find the best people for an organisation” (Alder, 2009).

Manoj Biswas, HR Lead, Accenture India, says, “Social media, without doubt, is fast emerging as one of the most efficient and engaging ways of personal or community interactions”. Mr. Naveen Narayanan, Global Head – Talent Acquisition, HCL Technologies, says, “Over the last couple of years, social media has certainly grown from being a novelty to one of the most powerful recruiting tools available for our hiring managers. Social media has changed our recruitment process, putting relationships at the very core. It has helped build personalized online connections and also helped us in enhancing our employer branding quotient.” According to Mr. Anil Kumar, General Manager, Professional Services, Marlabs Software, “Social media has made reaching masses and speedy identification of the right people very easy. Using social media, talent which is not looking out or is not present with job portals/ placement consultants is also accessible. Also, genuineness of resources is easy to identify.”
By design, Linked In and Facebook, are largely used as recruiting tools since they both include job-posting features for recruiters.According to an estimate, the active users of Facebook and Linkedin in India are more than 25 million and 10 million respectively. An attempt is made here under to identify the strength of social media as a tool of recruitment:

Social Recruiting & Employer Branding:
Social recruiting enhances employer branding quotient. Recently, several authors has proven the use of employer branding in promoting recruitment. Employer branding has been described as the ‘sum of a company’s efforts to communicate to existing and prospective staff that it is a desirable place to work’ (Lloyd 2002). In the pursuit to promote employer branding, organizations have been using several ways and means through which they can establish branding. A survey report by Hewitt Associates has prescribed five steps to develop a strong employer brand: (i) understand your organization, (ii) create a ‘compelling brand promise’ for employees that mirrors the brand promise for customers, (iii) develop standards to measure the fulfillment of the brand promise, (iv) ‘ruthlessly align’ all people practices to support and reinforce the brand promise, and (v) execute and measure. All the prescribed five steps can be leveraged in a better way if the organization will rely on social recruiting.

Social Recruitment & Employers Reach:
Social media helps reaching masses and promotes speedy identification of the right people. Social recruiting promotes efficient and engaging ways of personal or community interactions. The tool has an inherent potential to multiply connections, create viral networks and reach talent faster. Talent which is not looking out or is not present with job portals/ placement consultants is also accessible. According to an expert opinion, 80% of the candidates available on job portals are also present on social media, whereas not even 50% of the social media users are present in the job portals. Mr. Manoj Biswas, HR lead, Accenture India, states, “Opposed to popular opinion, social media is a platform where an employer can seek candidates, irrespective of the nature of the job. Social media websites act as effective recruitment tools to scout for talent with specific skill sets and a large qualified talent pool. With the large number of groups across multiple networks, employers can now exercise their discretion and narrow down a search to a specific type of organization/ qualifications/ skill set they are looking to hire.”

Challenges:
Although social media can be used in employee recruitment, it is not free from any drawbacks.
For example, Mr. Vasant Kudva, VP-talent acquisition team, QuEST Global, observes, “Among the challenges of using social media today, one of the key issues faced is inadequacy of information, e.g., although the usage of Linkedin is widespread in terms of number of people on it, perhaps only a fraction of people actually use all the features like detailed experience summary, current and previous job descriptions, listing all the schools attended, having or giving peer recommendations, etc. This tells us that relying overly on Linkedin for recruitment could also result in a wrong choice, as a candidate probably present on Linkedin may not be savvy enough.”
Mr. Naveen Narayanan says, “There are problems in maintaining consistency in our communication patterns and ensuring real time responses.” Further he adds, “When it comes to potential employees in social media, the lines between the objectives of marketing functions and recruitment functions of any organization gets blurred. In a large organizational construct such as ours (HCL has presence in 26 countries), synergies between the marketing and recruitment teams on communication strategy is a challenge.”
Mr. Anil Kumar, general manager, professional services, Marlabs Software, points out that building a network that responds to your messages/requests is a big challenge in itself. For this purpose, he says, “It is important to build confidence in your network that you are one among them and you are not there just to hunt people as any other recruiter or head hunter.”
“When properly rolled out, social media tools can help companies meet their No. 1 internal communication goal — engaging employees,” said Michael Rudnick, global intranet and portal leader at Watson Wyatt. It was stated in the “2009/2010 Communication ROI Study Report” by Watson Wyatt that highly effective communicators (organizations) use social media more often to reach all employee audiences.
Further, when it comes to internal social network, using them for recruitment is not as easy as it looks. According to a new report by information week, ‘Rebooting the Antisocial Network’, only 13 % of IT Professional believe their internal social network is a success.
Mr. Abhinaya Chakkirala, an HR professional with a large IT organization whose experience spans across Employee Engagement, Talent Management & Organization Development has identified following pitfalls that employers could avoid in order to become a successful social organization.
Lacking context – Launching an internal opinion sharing forum or chat platform without the right context for the messaging can be meaningless. The policy of the organization should identify the context for which various social media tools are to be used, without which the investment can be rendered useless.
Not choosing appropriately – Not all kinds of communication can be channeled through internal social networks. Sensitive messages like those relating to organizational changes are more effective when communicated in direct conversations whereas regular business performance updates or strategy interpretations can be done through leadership blogs allowing employees to post comments on their understanding and opinion.
Unpreparedness for traffic – One of the very common complaints of employees is about responsiveness of leadership on their social media vehicles. Questions or comments posted by employees rarely elicit responses from the leadership and in the occasions where leaders do post responses, they are delayed to a large extent. This is not because of issues with prioritization but mostly about unpreparedness for the traffic and in turn the time commitment required in accomplishing the task of timeliness of responses.
Vague and evasive responses – Social media erases boundaries in communication and provides a transparent channel for dialogue between employers and leadership. One of the associated features of this benefit is that it is also a forum where difficult questions are posed. Management and leadership of organizations can earn the trust and engage employees better by being candid in these interactions. Vague and evasive responses make employees resentful of their leaders, resulting in them being resistant to the inspiration that the leaders are expected to evoke.
Over Posting – High frequency of communication from the organization within short durations of time makes employees lose interest and it plays a role similar to spam messages. An effectiveness dipstick can offer insights into what unique frequencies are ideal for each of the organizations.

Conclusion

The use of Social media in recruitment is not a common story yet. It is still quite limited to the large multinational corporations (MNCs). A lot of other organizations are still asking the why, what and who questions in terms of the uses and benefits of social media. Further, users’ attitude is crucial for the success of social media in recruitment. For example, a report in Times of India has identified that Indian Girls have been a low users and many often shy away from the use of social media. There must be a strong buy-in to social media, a desire to find work in this way, the knowledge of how to find work in this way and an understanding of the implications social media will have on job-hunting and privacy.

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