How Much Is Social Media Helpful For The Recruiters To Hire Talent For An Organization?

Do you think that the organizations have to wait for sometime before judging the real worth of social media? Social networking is helping recruiters to find the best people from the market. So do you suggest on replacing social networking to other recruitment tools which are been used in the industry?

One of the best and better ways to find and recruit talent for an organization is via the social media route. However, many people and recruiters still believe the fact that its worth is still not explored to a larger extent.

Many recruiters have benefited a lot by using social media and networking to hire people for an organization. However, will it be successful for everyone, needs to be debated and discussed. Organizations still wants to gain confidence before moving from old conventional tools to consider social media approach as one of the best available remedies in the market today.

There are various thoughts and feelings which sets the mood and platform for people to interact online. Let us see how does it affects the online networking circuit.

Mind set of the hiring consultant

Recruiter assumes that connecting to an online or social media group will give him an easy access to a wide pool of talent. Further assumption is that communities or groups having similar background are more receptive to link to one another. To get a further understanding on this let us also consider the thought process that goes in the minds of people who are joining these networking sites.

Why do people want to get involved in talking to others via social media?

The whole sole purpose of people making online connections is to interact and socialize with friends with whom they rarely meet offline. They also look towards sharing and building their knowledge pool by involving in discussions and talks with others who have similar interests. However, there are only very few individuals who would choose social media to build or discuss great career prospects for future. I am keeping the professional networking sites like Linkedin etc out of these discussions as they are pure sites dedicated to working professionals. What we can conclude from here is that people take advantage of social networking to discuss their life events rather than building a strong professional network.

What can be figured out from this kind of behaviour of usage is:

The size of an individual’s network is very small if we compare it to the total connections strength.

Men responses are less if we compare it to any women. Six or more will be an average number of people with whom a female will be interacting while a man would manage to handle four at any point in time. The mixing of people with common background or profession is seen less as major talk revolves around sharing personal details and achievements. You are also not able to judge where that individual is working or what are his qualifications as people tend to avoid mentioning such details on their social networking profile. You are also not sure whether he has been successful in his profession or what his current employment status is till date.

The study above influences our decision and challenges us to revisit and analyze whether it is beneficial to judge people on the various so called social networking sites. Much deeper study is required before declaring this tool to be complete in all aspects.

Shady sides of Social Networking Arena:

We seldom find individuals on the social arena talking about their professional qualifications or career interests. We are able to locate where an individual is working however getting information beyond that is not possible. A recruiter then uses the available information to shortlist candidates. There are at times when he has rejected candidates because in their photographs they were not looking good or were involved in drinking and partying. In such a case the likelihood of rejecting a good candidate is pretty high. The real danger in this is that someone will include or exclude a candidate for no good reason.

What are the steps to search for right information about the candidates?

Are you confident that the information sorted out via social media for any candidate will be 100% true. No obviously as there are no supporting documents or proofs attached. In this kind of a scenario my advice will be not to heavily rely on social media tool for your hiring needs.

In order to make social media strategy work for our benefit, correct and real information needs to be floated online. Till the time this gap is there our relying on this medium is highly under a question mark.

Want to find out more about social networking for recruiters, then visit Amit Bhagria’s site on how to choose the best social networking tools for all your hiring needs.