Experts in the field caution both job seekers and employing organisations that online social and professional networks should be incorporated as adjunctive measures on both ends and not relied upon exclusively or instead of certain aspects of traditional recruitment, hiring, and job searching. Finally, the other obvious implication of the growing use of social networking sites (in particular) for this purpose is that one must become more careful than many have been in the past in terms of what information one posts in the vast public Internet forum to which prospective employers now share ready access.
"Professional sites net members in recession." Recruiter. 2009. HighBeam Research.
(January 4, 2011). http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-207095054.html
According to representatives of the most popular professional online network, LinkedIn, the firm has experienced a dramatic increase in use and popularity among job seekers since the onset of the current economic recession. Specifically, in the UK, LinkedIn has experienced an increase of forty-three percent in job postings and a forty-one percent increase in job applications filed through its services in between the 4th Quarter of 2008 and the 2nd Quarter of 2009. Business recruitment analysts suggest that much of the increase in popularity among job seekers is attributable to the low cost of job searching utilising this methodology. However, the company has also benefited from a thirty-five percent increase of its paid premium services during this same period, indicating that the availability of free networking opportunities is not the only reason for its popularity. Indeed, the company projects that as social online networking becomes more and more commonplace in society, its role specifically in connection with job searching and recruitment functions will reflect corresponding increases as well. In that regard, professional recruiters already consider LinkedIn and similar social and professional networks to be extremely valuable with respect to identifying employment candidates with particular knowledge, skills, and abilities required by specific employers and employment firms. That is substantially a function of the fact that employers and recruiters have long understood the relative value of...
"Executive Recruitment: Virtual Hiring Ventures - Give Me the Job or...; Guns? Nudity? This is not executive interviewing as we know it. But in virtual reality, the boundaries are very different "New Zealand Management Journal. 2009. HighBeam Research. (January 4, 2011). http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-19946099.html.
In light of the tremendous growth in the popularity of social and professional online networking, some professional hiring managers and staffing firms have begun including social online networks (such as MySpace and FaceBook) along with their existing recruitment efforts on online networks dedicated largely to professionals (such as LinkedIn). While there are advantages to expanding the population available to recruiters, there are also potential negative considerations of using social media, including the risk of exposure to individuals of questionable character (since social networks are not vetted in any meaningful way, especially with regard to veracity in employment history). On one hand, recruiters appreciate the immediate access to wide range of potential talent; they also consider social networking sites to expand the range of internal referrals, which are traditionally considered more reliable and cost-effective than external referrals.
Many employers who once prohibited the use of social networking sites at work now actually encourage it, particularly in connection with employees' using their social networks to identify and approach prospective job candidates. This is mainly attributable to the realisation that the same dynamics and algorithms that make social networking so effective also allow recruiters and employers to increase their pool of potential applicants exponentially. At the same time, employers have also had to consider some of the potential unwanted consequences of encouraging the use of social networking sites by their employees. Chief among those concerns is their increasing vulnerability to professional online staffing headhunters who also use those media to identify potential candidates based on their online profiles.
