This is what you need to know about social media hiring

In my previous post I wrote about how internet and social media is all around us. Here I will talk about, how this changes my hiring strategies as an employer.

Before I get into details of it, look at these statistics:

• 42% of world’s population has access to internet
• The average internet user spends around 4 hours and25 minutes using the net each day
• India’s web traffic is dominated by mobile devices, with phones alone accounting for 72%of all web pages
• Average social media user spends 2 hours and 25 minutesper day using social networks and microblogs

What this means is my current and prospective employee is out there on the internet. This is exciting, because as an employer, it helps me to do two key things:

• Promote my company as the next employer to my target audience
• Identify the next employee for me basis his/her social presence.

These two things are exactly what many organizations are figuring out these days. Moving beyond just LinkedIn and exploring the social behaviour patterns on other platforms is what employers are getting interested in.

However, one needs to very clearly know they why of it and then the how of it. Why would having the social behaviour pattern of a candidate help you identify the best fit? How do you need to get this data to do social media hiring?

These are very important two questions for any employer. You need not do anything about this social media bubble if it’s doesn’t suit your requirement as an employer. The impact of using it ineffectively is much higher than not doing it at all.

Google looks at your social media presence before hiring you, because they want a cool/innovative/connected employee.

If you are okay hiring candidates with relevant experience and not how and what they post of their FB walls, then you need not get into the HR and social media web.

The flip side of doing too much of social media checks and validation for candidates are:

• If I don’t know what information I want in a candidate, then it isn’t really giving me relevant data. So what if he blogs or uploads videos. What matters to me is if he has domain expertise for the field I want to hire him for.
• Too many eyes can really irritate candidates. If they know their timelines, tweets, blogs would be scanned by a microscope; they may not want to join such a prying organization.
• Many people have still not warmed up to social media sites. They have a Facebook page, but they don’t do much activity there. You may be rejecting technically competent candidates’ basis their inactivity on these sites.
• People are using social media on a daily basis, but the usage patterns are different. Not everyone has understood what it is. And hence they may have erred in following wrong people, posting weird things. Does that make them incapable of doing the daily activities of a role?

My humble suggestion to the HR fraternity out there is: Don’t do it because it is the cool and trending thing to do. Do it if it makes sense to you.