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.
Social networking has been successful to a handful of recruiters but that doesn’t mean it would be beneficial to all. Organizations need to figure out the answer to whether is it the right time to diverge from conventional tools to social networking approach as more and more recruiters preach and confirm social networking to be the best solution in the market these days.
What are the thoughts that go in people’s mind when they are online and on social networking sites? We need to study how this behavior affects the online networking platform.
Mind set of the hiring consultant
When a recruiter goes online on any social networking site, he carries a presumption that he is interacting with a big resource of professionals. He further thinks that if there is a commonality amongst them, they tend to connect with each other more. To understand this to a greater extent let us study what people think when they come or interact with people on the internet.
Thought that goes in people’s mind when they join social networking websites:
People look forward to stay in touch and connect with their friends. Most of the people interact through various social mediums to build strong and long term connections with their offline friends. They also look forward in gaining value by sharing information and their networks with others. Most of the individuals talk about their personal lives and very few indulge in career related activities or sharing their future aspirations with others. There are various dedicated sites on developing great career prospects however for our current discussion, I would like to keep them out of it.
The conclusion which can be deduced from this is:
The connection strength is quite huge in comparison to an individual’s network.
Men respond to an average of seven postings where as women to ten. At one time men often email or chat with not more than 4 while women can interact with six. An account holder’s ‘friends’ are seldom from the same profession or background. Most account holders are protective about friends in their core group. Since the basic purpose of joining social networks is to keep in touch with offline friends and acquaintances, information shared or exchanged is personal. Account holder profiles too seldom mention professional details and even if they do, those details are not enough to assess an individual’s professional competence or caliber. We are also unable to judge his performance or knowledge in that particular field.
Whether the social media tool will be successful in adhering to the corporate guidelines is still a question which is open for discussions. In order to extract benefits out of this system, we need to eradicate the obstacles at the ground level.
How much successful is Social Media?
Discussions around career development or honing one’s skills are seldom found in the various chat rooms or scraps. As a recruiter one would be able to extract very limited information on an individual’s candidature which most of the times leads to incorrect decision making. The profile of many individuals seems to hide the useful information and often carries plane garbage. This leads to a lot of confusions and many times resulting in delays and unjustifiable decisions.
How Do You Verify Online Details Of Candidates?
Based on the information available online, we shortlist few people who might fit into our criteria. Now how do you check whether the details are true and real? May be you can look through LinkedIn etc where that person probably have uploaded his resume otherwise it is certainly very difficult to judge at this point in time.
Efforts and work needs to be done at both ends in order to take decisions on the social media information. Whether this would be the next generation recruitment tool, I am doubtful.
Learn more about social networking for recruiters. Stop by Amit Bhagria’s site where you can find out all about social networking tools and what it can do for you.
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