How much social media or networking helping organizations to hire talented people? We find many recruiters nowadays effectively using social networking for hiring the best people for an organization. Now the question which needs to be answered is on whether this social networking can replace other recruiting tools.

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 have 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.

There are various thoughts and feelings which sets the mood and platform for people to interact online. Let us see how does it affects the online networking circuit.

What does the recruiter or hiring person thinks:

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.

Psychology of the People joining Social Media sites:

They want to keep their existing social connections alive. It is been found that most of the people socialize online to retain and strengthen their relations which are offline. To build on their social capital and connections. Social capital refers to the value individuals can extract in terms of information, personal connections, interests etc from their online buddies or connections. Very few individuals have been found investing in building social connections to talk about career prospects or to tap upon any employment opportunity in the future. Here I am not mentioning sites like LinkedIn or Recruting Blogs which are solely dedicated for professional interactions. What seems on the most of the social arena is that people are more interested in sharing their life activities to an outer world rather than networking with others which prevents them from exploiting other possibilities of social networking.

What can be figured out from this kind of behaviour of usage is:

The size of an individual’s network is very small if we compare it to the total connections strength.

Women are more receptive to any post in comparison to men. A man will hardly talk to 4 people at a time while women might be hovering above 6. It would be alarming to see that individuals are apprehensive in talking to people sharing same profession or interests. The information which is exchanged online is more related to people’s own lives rather than any other fruitful knowledge. Individuals restrain from sharing information regarding their job or work online which does not help in analyzing their correct professional details. Further no comments can be made on a person’s performance or skill sets.

The observation above forces us to rethink on the benefits of social networking in the professional arena. However what can be concluded from here is that we are going to face lot of challenges in using it as a complete recruiting tool.

Aspects of Social Medium which needs to be disclosed:

Discussions around career development or honing one’s skills are seldom found in the various chatrooms 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.

Information on checking the Candidate’s whereabouts:

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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