Friday, March 18, 2011

Government using social media for recruitment - Hiring trends in 2012


It’s a well known fact that today employers actively log on to prospective employee’s profiles to check weather they suit the organization. Therefore, it is essential that any information one puts up on a social networking website is clean and projects clean image of you. However, it’s not just employers who war checking out social media to hire employees, it works the other way around as well. People looking for jobs, often hop onto the facebook pages of prospective employer to learn weather the job is lucrative enough and weather the organization will offer them what they are looking for.

The government is also actively using social media today for recruitment and that can be seen in the number of facebook pages that the government has online today. In fact, the state of Missouri hired their first employee off a portal called Second Life, in response to this CIO Dan Ross said, “He came to our job fair as a cat with a red bow tie on”. Recruiters are finding new ways to keep their prospective employees entertained by looking at avenues that are unconventional and therefore finding like minded individuals in the process.

35% of companies both private and public use social media as a platform to create communication on the net with prospective employees and clients. The idea is simple, create a connect with your stakeholder and make sure they are engaged so as to create top of mind recall. A company official at Capgemini also mentioned that, “Through social media channels
, we provide prospective candidates a glass-door view into the company.”

A number of government as well as private organizations use the medium of social media to recruit employees simply because it is necessary to exploit every resource that is available.
S. Balaji, CEO MaFoi Consultants believes that while using every resource is a great idea, “The type of recruitment channel used by a company is based on the kind of recruitment needs. Different positions require varied approaches. While bulk recruitment of engineers would not happen through advertisements on social media, laterals for specific positions would.”

The government is actively using social media to recruit employees by hosting listing for openings in a variety of sectors by way of social media. The trend may have been started by small organizations who do not have the marketing capacity to use traditional medium of marketing to attract attention, but the reach of the medium has coerced a number of large conglomerates as well as government agencies to use this medium as one of the main source of finding employees that may do justice to the job.

There has been a paradigm shift in the way people craft their recruiting strategies now, the need of the hour is to maximise resources that are available, and with social media offering an inexpensive and comprehensive approach to recruitment, it is here to stay.

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