Pros and Cons of Social Media in Recruitment

91% that is the answer to the question: What percentage of companies use social media in their recruiting efforts?

Social networks like Linkedin, Instagram, and Twitter have increasingly become a common hiring tool for most recruiters and HR professionals. Although research shows that using social networks in recruitment has a lot of advantages, many research analyses have uncovered a number of ethical risks. 

Advantages:

A Time Effective Sources of Information: Social networks can provide a wide range of information about applicants that can help hiring-managers determine if a candidate would be a good fit for the organization. At a basic level, this tool is both cost and time-effective. In fact, a 2017 study by researcher Nuno Robelo found that the use of social media in recruiting on average helps reduce the process from 32 to 16 days.

Provides Insight into a Candidates' Personalities: Social networks can also provide a more in-depth idea of a candidate’s personality and intelligence according to a 2009 study by Donald Klumper and Peter Rosen. Profiles can provide us with information about an applicant's extraversion, agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness, and neuroticism. As well as clues surrounding decision-making and judgment.

Verify Information: These networks also allows recruiters to verify information that they have received through CV’s, applications, and recommendation letters. This means that recruiters can see if there are any discrepancies between job titles, time spent in an organization, stated skills.

Increases the Diversity of Your Candidate Pool: Finally, social networks allow people from different backgrounds to connect with companies thus increasing the diversity of their applicant pool. Overall, hiring professionals can use social media to divide candidates into groups based on the additional information they have harvested. This allows them to quickly exclude any candidates that they feel would not fit well with the organization based on their personality, perceived level of intelligence, and skills.

Ethical Considerations:

According to research by Michele Gelfand 69% of hiring professionals admit to rejecting someone based on what they learned about the candidate through social media. The size of this number begs for thoughtful consideration of not only the advantages but also the ethical risks of using social media in recruiting. Some of these risks include:

Inaccurate or Incomplete Information: A big ethical risk hiring recruiters may run into while using this tool is coming across inaccurate or incomplete information. If a candidate has not updated their profile in a while or accidentally included the wrong information, this may raise a red flag for recruiters trying to verify information on the candidates. Even if a recruiter runs across an updated social media profile, they may run into the profile of someone with the same name and not the actual candidate. This may mean that great candidates get looked over.

Increasing Chances of Bias: Finally, there is a potential for both unconscious and conscious discrimination as social networks can reveal a candidates’ race, marital status, religion, ability (Klumper & Rosen, 2009). These are factors that hiring professionals are barred from asking candidates because knowledge of them may lead to rejection due to personal bias. This is true despite these characteristics not having anything to do with the job itself.

Based on the advantages and disadvantages of using social networks in recruitment, it is that social networks be used as a complementary tool in the recruitment process and not as a primary source of information.

In order to reduce ethical risks, companies need to create a social media screening policy and training all hiring professionals on it. This will help to reduce any unethical gathering of information and provide guidelines on what to do with incomplete information. The policies should also advise the hiring staff to wait and use social media in the selection process after the initial interview and have it completed by HR professionals as they are more knowledgeable about the laws and ethics surrounding hiring and employment. 

Finally, candidates should be informed that a screening of their social media will be conducted in order to uphold transparency in the process. These steps can help reap the advantages of perusing social networks while reducing any ethical risks.