Here we are talking about social media sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. They are public and open to anyone to access. Many companies use these sites as part of a hiring process to reach a candidate, but how should they use social media sites? As you can imagine, these sites can give a candidate a pretty good idea of what they are looking for and help a company weed out the candidates that aren’t quite right for the position.
One way to use these sites to determine a candidate’s suitability is to analyze their social media accounts to find out what type of messages they are posting. The more messages you see, the better. If you see a lot of “I hate you” messages, that points towards someone who doesnt like your company. If they post a lot of jokes about their employer, that points towards someone who doesnt like their job.
Of course, it can be tricky to see a candidate’s message in the aggregate. It’s easy to get too focused on a candidate’s posts and ignore the messages in their social media accounts. But this is one of those situations that makes me like what I do.
I have a different perspective on this than most people, because I don’t think the way that a candidate chooses to communicate is important. I think that the person is still important, but the company is not. So, I wouldn’t say that the company is choosing to use social media to see who to hire. But then again, I wouldn’t say that a candidate is choosing to post every message of their heart either.
In any case, if a company is choosing to use social media to try to hire candidates, I would think it would be wise to use the candidate’s online presence to at least try to determine where they stand on the candidates social media website.
Well, at least a company is honest about the fact that it would like to hire people who are able to bring out their best work. I think that would be quite different from a candidate not being able to bring out all their best work.
Google, as it is, does not track or monitor candidate social media sites. This isn’t a big deal for most companies because they already have an algorithm that will look for certain things in the candidates’ social media sites. However, it can be quite a big deal for companies that want to hire candidates who are more social than a typical candidate.
Most companies would only be concerned with their own social media sites because it is a common denominator. However, they have to be very careful because, if you are able to use the same social media sites for multiple positions, you can be a real problem for any employer. It is possible to use multiple social media sites for the same job search, but it is not easy and you need to be very careful about what you use.
We want to hire candidates who are social, and we can’t do that if we find they are using the same social media sites for the same job search. The best thing you can do to protect yourself is to ask questions in each social media site that you can find about the candidate.
