In one of the articles that I chose is written that the number of companies that are using social networking sites to decide on potential hires has doubled compared with to last year. The main point of this article is that 35% of the employers decided not to hire based on the content uncovered in a social networking site.
It is well known that the social behaviour is changing due to the internet, thus I am going to analyze one of the impacts in the companies. There are several ways to use social networks in companies and each of them can have a positive or a negative result, therefore the wiser decision is the one that must be taken by the managers of the companies. One of the departments where social networks could be used as a useful tool is the HR department. This issue can determine the success or the failure of the HR performance. Let us suppose that HR in a company uses Facebook in order to decide to hire staff or not. For example, if HR after an analysis of the competence of the postulant decides to take a look of his or her in Facebook and then they get a negative input from the point of view of good behaviour and moral issues. Now, what happened if HR does not hire this person? We are supposing that this person is skilled to take that place but because his or her Facebook information the person is not going to be hired. In my opinion, the problem is not social networking itself, but the problem is the users. Sometimes somebody wins and somebody loses, but in this case there are only losers. The company wasted the time and a skilled employee; meanwhile the postulant will have to keep looking for a job. In order to prevent the failure of social networking it is important that the users use the social network in order to get an advantage; I mean, not only to get an easier way to do the job (company) and a easier way to have fun (postulant). However, before the users learn a better way to use the social networks, Facebook is working (or supposes to, you never know if what you read is true) in new privacy setting that will allow the users to decide different levels of privacy. Therefore, it should be mandatory for the companies to rule the use of the social network that has to agree with the philosophy of the company.
There is a study that was conducted by the University of Johannes Gutenberg in Germany in which they concluded that the profiles of the people that use Facebook and Twitter show a real identity of the person and not a fake identity. Therefore, we could conclude that companies may use the social networks to get information from the persons that they are going to hire. In this case we can rely that the social network is being used in the right way. Furthermore, in the future it could be a necessity to have our personalised web site in order to communicate and take more advantage from the internet.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/20/more-employers-use-social-networks-to-check-out-applicants/http://www.emol.com/noticias/tecnologia/detalle/detallenoticias.asp?idnoticia=385642
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2 comments:
Yes, the problem lies with the users, not the technology. Garbage in, garbage out, as they say. I am concerned that you agree so readily with the Gutenberg study. It may be correctly done, but does a sample of only 236 profiles really speak for the hundreds of millions of users worldwide? It may be safe as A source but not THE source, no?
The Gutenberg study uses a small sample meanwhile the study developed by Harris Interactive uses a huge sample of 2,667 managers and human resources workers. I think that both studies are reliable to make inferences. However, is important to notice that they are different about the method, thus small samples could be better selected regarding the objective of the study. A good example of sucessful small samples is the survey before presidential elections since most of the time (maybe always) it is known who will be the next president. The solution for this dilemma may be to know more about the features of the samples.
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