Business Case Studies, Organizational Behavior Case Study, Strategy, Competitive Strategies Case Studies

Social Networking: A Better Recruitment Platform?

Article by author Vandana Jayakumar

The use of Internet in recruitment is not new. In fact, over the years, e-recruitment has become popular both among the employers as well as job seekers. The reason behind the popularity of Internet as a recruitment source is the advantages that the use of Internet offers over the traditional methods of recruitment. Popularity of Internet in recruitment can be gauged from the fact that there are almost 50,000 job sites in the US alone. Monster, Yahoo! HotJobs and CareerBuilder are some of the premier job sites among them. Interestingly, other sites such as the social networking sites are also becoming popular as a source of recruitment. Many of us are registered with one or more of the social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. Being on the social networking sites is generally considered to be a fun filled activity. However, many social networking sites such as Ryze and LinkedIn are designed with a professional motive and are seriously into business. These are being increasingly used by companies as well as jobs seekers for professional purposes.

The companies use the social networking sites for finding talented professionals. At the same time, the professionals try to make themselves visible to the employers and also network with the people of their fraternity. While LinkedIn and other social networking sites are gaining popularity, they are affecting the business of the job sites. There have been reports that the social networking sites have already dented the business of jobsites like monster.com. The social networking sites are gaining popularity as a source of recruitment as they offer better solutions as compared to the job sites. Not that the use of social networking sites is flawless. However, to what extent can the social networking sites be used as a source of recruitment? Undeniably, there are certain jobs than cannot be filled by using the social networking sites. And even if the social networking sites can be used for recruitment, they might have to be supplemented by some other source of recruitment to accomplish a meaningful recruitment task. In most of the cases, the final lap of the recruitment cycle has to be the personal interaction between the employer and the employee.

Companies use a variety of platforms to source the required talent. However, is there any ideal platform for sourcing the talent given the nature of job and the nature of experience/job proficiency/years of experience? The following matrix might throw some light on answering the above question.

As the social networking sites gain popularity as a source of recruitment, will they indeed be able to affect the business of jobs sites? Off course, the job sites will not sit quiet. Even they will go all out to fight back. In fact, they are already fighting back. Job sites like Monster.com have upgraded their services and are already providing the networking feature in their job sites. Thus, while we debate if the social networking sites are jeopardising the business of job sites, with job sites adding the networking feature to their sites, the tables could turn for the social networking sites as well. So, let’s see, who emerges out victorious in the long run. There could also be a possibility of mutual coexistence of the two. After all, it’s a question of who satisfies the users better.