February 13, 2012

How to wield the double-edged social recruiting sword

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Social media is here to stay! Tweet your way to a new job! Use Facebook to meet hundreds of new contacts! ...

From the look of many job-search advice columns, it would seem as if the use of online social networks is the only way job seekers today can find employment. While membership in sites like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook can vastly improve your chances of making connections with hiring managers, they are certainly not guarantees of success. In fact, an over-reliance on social media could end up backfiring not only for job seekers, but for the companies themselves that are looking to recruit top talent.

Last month, a social recruitment service called TweetMyJobs, which matches job listings with targeted candidates via Twitter and Facebook, completed a study about the use of social media in the recruiting industry. The company surveyed 2,000 job seekers and 400 companies looking for new hires and distilled their responses into a two-minute summary video called "Is Social Recruiting Real?"

Here are a few of the survey's findings:

• 29 percent of job seekers use social media as their primary tool for job searching
• 16 percent of companies have Twitter accounts dedicated to HR and careers
• 92 percent of companies allocate less than 10 percent of their recruiting budget to social media
• 45 percent of companies say they plan to invest more in social recruiting in 2012

While the video, produced with insistent move-trailer-like music, is intended to dramatize the "astounding growth in social media" that has "forced companies to rethink how to find quality candidates," the numbers still show a medium just getting out of its infancy. As the video points out, about half of the job seekers surveyed still use traditional job boards as their primary tools to find work.

The answer to TweetMyJobs' question about whether social recruiting is "real" is a resounding yes. Some of the many companies that use social recruiting include such hiring powerhouses as Starbucks, Kaiser Permanente, Allstate, Radio Shack and Citibank, the video explains. However, the data show that social media is only one tool in the recruiting toolbox and has not yet -- and may never -- become the "gold standard" of future recruiting methods.

For job seekers, the access that social media can provide is phenomenal, but at the same time, so is the potential exposure. Employers are always looking for effective methods to narrow down the hundreds of possible hiring choices in the quickest possible way. A scan of an applicant's Facebook page or Twitter account for any inappropriate comments or photos has become a time-honored search-and-destroy technique used by many recruiters. In this way, a careless social media profile can end up being the excuse recruiters are seeking to trim down the application piles.

Social recruiting, however, also presents a thorny dilemma among recruiters and their corporate clients. Facebook and Twitter can quickly find flaws in a job seeker's application, but they can also reveal lots of other personal details that can make employers vulnerable to discrimination lawsuits. Social media profiles often contain information about a candidate's race, religious affiliation, political views, gender, disability and a host of other taboo subjects that are not supposed to be discussed by potential employers under the federal Affirmative Action Program and regulations enforced by the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs.

Even though this personal information is assumed to be disseminated on the Internet with the knowledge and blessing of the job candidate, companies have no way of proving that the information did not play a role in any decision to reject an application. As a result, many recruiters are understandably shy about looking at job applications that reveal anything other than work history information and the relevant skills for the job. Those job seekers who rely too heavily on social media to apply for jobs, therefore, may go undetected by many cautious recruiters and employers.

So what does this mean to the average job seeker? As with most rules of thumb, moderation is the key. Make sure you use social media to your fullest advantage, but don't forget the traditional methods of scanning job boards such as nwjobs.com, joining associations and attending networking functions. The job seeker with the most wide-ranging arsenal of networking tools usually has the best chance of avoiding cuts by these double-edged swords.

Randy Woods writes about job-search tools, networking techniques and other tips to help you land your dream job.

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discrimination, Facebook, HR, LinkedIn, networking, recruiting, social media, Twitter

1 Comments

Matt Youngquist on February 13, 2012 10:00 AM | Reply

Randy:

Terrific article and having studied the use of social media in job hunting for many years, myself, I couldn't agree more that moderation is the key!

I routinely see people spend hours and hours playing around on Facebook and Twitter, hoping to coax up an occasional lead or contact, when in that same time span they could have easily reached out to dozens of companies directly to pitch themselves -- or spent their time engaging in "traditional" networking efforts far more likely to produce results.

So while social media is definitely going to play a growing role in the employment world, and candidates should be leveraging it to a certain extent, it's still way down the list (in my opinion) in terms of a way for the average job hunter to generate leads. People sometimes forget that not every employer in Seattle is highly sophisticated or works in the high-tech space where these tools run rampant...

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