You Manage It! 3: Technology/Social Media Social Media in the Hiring Process
As discussed in the Manager’s Notebook, “Don’t Get Screened Out in a Social Media Screen ,” as a job applicant, it is best to recognize that many employers are using social media screening and accordingly to put your best foot forward. In this case, we take another look at the use of social media in the hiring process and ask you to consider issues from the perspectives of an applicant and a manager.
Many employers are using social media, such as Facebook and LinkedIn, in their recruitment and hiring process. As illustrated in Figure 5.8, the use of social media ranges from promotion, to public screening, and to private screening. Employers use social media as a promotion tool when they place ads and recruit for job applicants on social networking sites. Public screening refers to employer use of publically available digital information, such as postings, profiles, and blogs, in the evaluation of job applicants. Private screening, on the other hand, involves employers’ asking applicants to provide access to their private social networking accounts.
FIGURE 5.8 Categories of Employer Use of Social Media
There has been surprisingly little research on the effectiveness of social media as a recruitment tool or as a screening tool. However, there have been an increasing number of legal protections offered to job applicants regarding private screening. Employers may be overstepping a line of expected privacy by asking applicants for passwords to their social networking sites or by asking applicants to log in so that the employer can review the account. Given privacy concerns, legislation prohibiting this practice has been proposed or passed in various states and at the federal level.
Critical Thinking Questions
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5-22. Do you think that the use of social media for recruitment is an effective approach to recruit workers?
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5-23. As a manager looking to hire additional workers, what steps would you take to maximize the effectiveness of your recruitment efforts using social media?
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5-24. Using social media to recruit for job openings may disproportionately tap into younger applicants. Older workers could be unintentionally precluded from the applicant pool to the extent they are less present and active on social networking sites. Why would this be a problem? What would you recommend to eliminate or reduce this problem?
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5-25. There are potential costs to the use of social media for screening job applicants. For example, checking public profiles could easily reveal to a manager the religion, age, race, and so on of job candidates. This information could be used by the manager to screen applicants. Why is this a problem? Even if this type of information was not used to screen applicants, how could a manager, or company, prove it?
Team Exercise
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5-26. The use of social media for public screening of job applicants can offer benefits to an employer such as a relatively low cost recruitment alternative and a means for finding information about applicants that may be more honest than what is found in cover letters and resumes. However, costs may also be involved with this use of social media. For example, a charge of discrimination may occur (see Critical Thinking Question 5-25); postings that appear to have been by a candidate may have been made by someone else; or information about a candidate’s activities may be old and no longer valid.
As a team, identify potential benefits of the use of social media for public screening. Also, identify potential costs of this approach. How could the potential costs be reduced?
Experiential Exercise: Team
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5-27. Validity of measures is a critical concept in hiring: it is needed to identify those who will be better workers, and it is needed to legally defend the selection process. In the case of using social media to screen applicants, there is little evidence of validity of the various types of information that might be collected. How could the content validity of social media be developed?
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a. As a team, pick a job and identify aspects of the job, such as task or competencies needed. Are there types of social media information that would reflect these aspects? Why would this job-driven approach be useful?
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b. As a team, identify how you could assess the criterion-related validity of the types of social media information you identified in in Question 5-27a. How would this validity information be useful?
Share the assessments of your team with the rest of the class.
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Experiential Exercise: Individual
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5-28. Companies have recently been created, such as Social Intelligence, that offer pre-employment social media screening. Using an Internet search, identify some of the companies offering this service. What do the companies offer? Would you recommend the use of such a third-party approach to performing social media screening of job applicants? Why or why not?