As organizations have sought to find ways to use social media, they have encountered the very difficult truth that it actually requires some skill, understanding and commitment to the medium. Indeed, as companies use social media more in the process of recruiting, they consistently encounter serious unexpected difficulties. Chief among these issues is that recruiters will often find and interact with many more disqualified individuals than qualified ones, so much so that finding excellent candidates via social media can seem like searching for a needle in a haystack.
Part of the difficulty arises because job seekers know that recruiters and their employers will check their backgrounds on social media, which can in turn cause people to either alter their pages to present an inaccurate view of themselves or cause the job seeker to become less interested in the employers. Additionally, the open and broad use of social media means that recruiters and perspective employers may encounter strangers on job posting pages whose purpose is to make some manner of mischief by, for example, perpetrating online predator intrusions. Also, the openness of job boards may frighten job seekers who may not want it known that they are searching for new employment for fear of reprisals from their present employers. Indeed, disloyalty is an oft-cited reason for people getting laid off.
Job-seekers have reason to fear that social media will provide an opportunity for employers to conduct unauthorized background checks. However, such searches are easier for employers because it prevents them from having to constantly check with the listed references, and it also circumvents situations in which references do not have the legal right to provide certain kinds of information. Since communications with references are typically carried out in a written format, the written documents can subject the references to potential legal litigation should the job applicant perform at a lower than expected rate. In order to get around this, sometimes the recruiters can ask for references from outside of the list provided by the job applicant. Not all the references will provide accurate descriptions about the job applicant, and not all of them are qualified to be references.
Unfortunately, using a job applicant’s personal social media page to perform a background check can violate the integrity of the applicant’s privacy. If the job applicant gets rejected, they may have grounds to pursue a lawsuit for discriminating against them based on race, gender, religion, health, sexual orientation, or other characteristics that are irrevalent to the technical qualifications of the job.
Given the complexities of using social media to find employees, recruiters have to search for, invite and check out a great many applicants. Under the guidelines governing equal opportunity, every applicant should have an equal chance to be screened. Recruiters can grow weary from putting in the work to create, manage and maintain job board social media pages because it takes so much work to check, screen, and moderate all of the job applicants via a particular social media site. Recruiters can spend more time on maintaining such sites than they do in actually selecting the best-qualified candidates.
Another problem that arises is that not all highly qualified job seekers use social media to apply for jobs. Indeed, quite often superb candidates are not technologically savvy and they might not have the ability to present themselves online in a manner that attracts employer interests. It is also possible that excellent candidates lack the time to engage online with the recruiters when they are so involved with their current jobs. Their professional commitments can cause them to become silent or even to lose interest in the job openings.
A job applicants’ savvy regarding their social media presence provides limited information about such individuals. Indeed, recruiters and their employers can easily place too much emphasis on the contents on the job applicants’ social media pages, and in the course of doing so may unintentionally eliminate superb candidates. So as to better understand job seekers, developing relationships with them online can take months, and it can be time consuming. Even still, such commitment does not necessarily guarantee that the screening process produces the appropriate candidate.
In the end, it is not surprising that job recruiting will mean that difficulties such as this arise. After all, despite all of its benefits, the Internet still remains rife with liars, identity thieves, privacy invaders, bullies, predators and antisocial personalities. As such, those offering a job online will have to sort through all manner of people with dishonest intentions in order to find a true gem. Moreover, negative interactions on social media can potentially turn away qualified job seekers from applying.
Recruiters and their employers should balance the use of social media with traditional methods for recruiting. For example, announcing job fairs via social media allows for employers to meet job applicants in person and select out the right applicant for the second round of interviews. The recruiters should become familiar or even affiliated with various professional associations in order to get acquainted with potential job seekers with the appropriate qualifications. Additionally, employers should develop better employee referral programs in order to recruit candidates who already have professional relationships with their employees. Recruiting through social media provides a tool that one can use –in conjunction with a range of other tools- to search for qualified candidates. Indeed, this notion of using social media, not as the sole tool but as a single item within a bigger palate of tools, is vital to the success of recruiters.
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