Services Marketing Case Study

Social Networking: Threatening the Monster and Its Likes?

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Abstract:
Very contemporary in nature, this case study was written to analyse the use of social networking as a source of recruitment and also to trigger a discussion on the possibility of social networking sites becoming a formidable competitive threat to on-line recruitment sites. Over the years, Internet has gained popularity in recruitment both among employers and among job seekers. Given the popularity of job sites, in the US alone, there are almost 50,000 job sites – Monster.com, Yahoo! HotJobs.com and CareerBuilder.com, being the front-runners. While job sites were one of the predominant ways of using the Internet in recruitment, the latest fad is to use social networking sites. The social networking sites gained popularity due to the advantages offered by them over and above the job sites. In the recent past, such has been the popularity of social networking sites like linkedin.com and twitter.com that the business of job sites is under threat. Their revenues have declined and they are forced to improvise their services to counter the competition. Will increasing popularity of social networking sites capture the trend from job sites. Critics believe that the popularity of the social networking sites will diminish in due course of time. Will the job sites succeed in fighting back, relegating social networking sites to the background?

Pedagogical Objectives:

• To identify various sources of recruitment for companies and to assess the significance of Internet as a source of recruitment and critically evaluate e-recruitment
• Debating on the competition between job sites and social networking sites as preferred choice of employers and job seekers
• To debate and discuss on the appropriate recruitment source for different jobs; i.e., is there an ideal recruitment source for a specific job?

Keywords : Recruitment, E-Recruitment, Online Recruitment, Job Sites, Social Networking Sites, Social Networking, Job Boards, Monster.com, Careerbuilder.com, LinkedIn.com, Twitter.com, Facebook.com, MySpace.com, Job Postings, Head-Hunters