What Hiring Managers Need To Consider Before Using Social Media as a Recruiting Tool

 
Social Media has been the hot topic for quite a while. Some business-to-consumer companies, such as Sears, have gone so far as to purchase technology companies that might be able to give them an edge in reaching those much sought after customers through this new medium.   What’s more, every week in the Cincinnati region at least one association or for-profit trainer is offering a social media training course you can attend. And according to their pitch, you too will be an expert and reap the benefits of being a part of the social media wave in just a couple hours.
 
So should you jump in with both feet and maybe try to find some of the best and the brightest talent for your team leveraging these new tools? According to research performed by First Research, more than 70 percent of employers surveyed planed to try recruiting through online social networks. But before you get started, here are a few things to consider:
 
1. Your Time - In order to be successful through social media it takes a lot of time. Whether your using Facebook, Twitter or another social media, the upfront time required to build a good following or network can be fairly significant, as is the time required to maintain that following. On Twitter, for example, it is commonly quoted that when creating your presence you should spend one to two hours a day, at a minimum, creating meaningful content, responding to posts and becoming a follower for the audience you’re looking to attract. For most hiring managers this is time away from areas where they could be better serving their company.
 
2. The Candidate Pool – Everyone wants to reach the holy grail of candidate pools – the crème de la crème of passive job seekers. If you think that this exists somewhere within social media you may be very disappointed. While the cost is mostly intangible, in most cases it only requires your time, the quality of responses you receive to posting your 140 characters about a job opening is going to be about equal to or less than the quality of going through other traditional methods. The reason is, over the last 24 months the demographics of those joining social media in droves is more representative of the general public and not primarily the leading edge of technology savvy thought leaders. Efficiency is not maximized here.
 
3. Business vs. Personal – As a hiring manager, if you are going to create a presence in social media where you will be discussing or promoting your company, it must stay strictly business-focused. The hiring manager that wants to discuss politics, or virtually anything else, is walking on thin ice. Not only can the viral nature of social media quickly create an uncontrollable negative publicity issue, many companies have started monitoring employee’s social media pages and the number of employees terminated due to statements made online is continuing to grow.
 
4. Knowing too much – According to a CareerBuilder study, roughly 22% of the 3,000+ hiring managers surveyed used social media in the hiring process in 2008. Of those, 34% used this information to eliminate someone from the hiring process. However, using social media could provide you with too much information about someone and using these sites in the hiring process caries with it a number of legal obligations. Age Discrimination in Employment, Executive Order 11246, Americans with Disabilities Act and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act are all laws protecting people from disparate treatment and disparate impact that are enforced by the EEOC and OFCCP. 
 
For example, if you check the Facebook or LinkedIn profiles only for some applicants, or assess the information you see differently for different applicants, then you could expose yourself to claims of disparate treatment. You also open yourself to disparate impact claims if you decide to rely heavily on social media. Is it possible that older or disabled applicants are less likely to have profiles on the social media sites that you are leveraging? Ultimately, if you use information from a candidates social media profile to impact your hiring decision, this is just scratching the surface regarding trouble spots that you can encounter when using social media.
 
Ultimately, social media as a part of the hiring process is probably not something that will go away or slow down anytime in the near term. Facebook with 200+ million users, LinkedIn with 39 million users and Twitter with more than 11 million users makes these social media tools difficult to ignore. As companies create and firm up their approach and stance on how social media can be used by employees, hiring managers will want to become well versed with these policies.  
 
If you have any questions about this or any other staffing issues please contact your account manager who is always eager to help.