HR and Payroll Software Blog

Using Social Networking Sites in Hiring?

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More and more employees and management people are using social networking sites in their personal lives. And they're also starting to use social networking sites in work-connected ways...including in their job searches and their hiring process.

So, the question arises: When you and your company are ready to begin hiring again, should you use social networking sites to attract job applicants and to check out job applicants?

Shafiq Lokhandwala, CEO of HR technology firm NuView Systems, cautions against using the purely social networking sites in the hiring process. Among the most popular social networking sites are Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter. People use these sites to connect with each other and to inform others about what they are doing, to generate discussions, and to follow each other. They're mostly for posting and exchanging personal information.

Lokhandwala distinguishes the LinkedIn site as a professional network rather than a social networking site.

"If the job you're looking to fill is a low level job that anyone can do," says Lokhandwala, "then social networking sites can work." But there aren't that many of those types of jobs anymore. If the job or position requires levels of essential knowledge, experience, and skill... then going to social networking sites to learn about people has risks.

1. Social sites are not places where people share information, photos, and videos about their professional lives. They're sharing about their social lives, their hobbies, their opinions, tastes and personal preferences. "In society we have a work face and a social face," Lokhandwala explains. "In work you may not have any alcohol but in your personal life you can. So the fact that a social site is more about what you do in a social setting causes people who look at it from a professional perspective to come to wrong conclusions." "So you may be depending on inaccurate information if you depend on what you learn from a social networking site," he says.

2. You may generate too many applications and too much information. Says Lokhandwala: "If you're trying to recruit in social networking sites you may be recruiting where your best candidates may not be. If you get your recruiting out into these general spaces you may get people who are aspiring for a job but who are not actually qualified. You'll get a huge amount of applicants without the accurate information you need."

3. Inaccurate information is a risk. "When you look at information on Facebook or Twitter without the applicant's permission, and you draw conclusions on that information, you are potentially relying on inaccurate, speculative information," Lokhandwala continues. "You're relying on social situations that may have occurred that have no bearing on the individual's ability to do the job. It may lead you to infer this person is not qualified for the position you're looking to fill.