Introduction
The purpose of this report is to determine ways through which Wesker Innovations can effectively expand its recruitment process and turn away from the traditional campus enrolment that it currently engages in.
This report will examine the major types of social media recruitment and their limitations to draw the recommendations that the firm should implement for it to develop the most effective employee enrolment criteria. This report will help the firm to do way with the traditional campus recruitment that it has used for many years, which has a number of limitations.
Social media platforms such as Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook, make it very easy for employers to reach as many potential employees as possible within a short time. The only thing that the employers need to do to reach the potential employees is to post the jobs on the social media sites.
Wesker Innovations can also reap these benefits if it embraces the idea of social media recruitment (Deb 140). The report will outline all the major issues concerning social media recruitment, which include the types available, the benefits of this new method and the limitations of campus recruitment among others. This report is expected to be of great help to Michael Their, who is the human resource coordinator at Wesker, as well as the firm.
Needs for Social Media Recruitment
Types of Recruitment
The major types of recruitment in most firms include: internal, external, and third party. Most firms allow their current employees to apply for the new posts that come up before they are posted externally. In the internal recruitment, the posts to be filled are posted on the firm’s websites and as posters in other busy places within its premises such as information boards and cafeterias.
In this type of recruitment, a firm can also send its HR team to education institutions to recruit suitable individuals from the students. This method of recruitment is called campus recruitment and is done in collaboration with the institutions’ placement offices. In most cases, the firms take full control of internal recruitment (Deb 141).
In cases where the internal recruitment fails to produce the most desired candidates, the external recruitment becomes the best option. In this type of recruitment, a firm seeking to recruit employees posts the open positions on local newspapers, internet job boards, and other external places where the public can view them. The firm may also ask for referrals from its current employees. The collected resumes are then evaluated to determine the most suitable candidates (Deb 140).
The third type of recruitment involves seeking the services of a third party. Third parties in this case mainly consist of recruitment agencies and companies. A firm wishing to fill its open vacancies delegates the recruitment job to the agencies, which do the whole process of enrolment on behalf of the company. In the third party type of recruitment, the agencies ensure that the individuals they pick meet the job requirements set by their client firms (Deb 143).
Limitations of Campus Recruitment
There are a number of limitations that hinder campus recruitment from being considered efficient. Firstly, the campus recruitment is so costly and occasionally, time consuming. In some cases, the costs incurred in the campus method are about twice the salaries that are supposed to be offered for the position to be filled. Since, the firms are the ones responsible for training the recruits; the method may at times take unnecessarily longer (Roebuck 112).
The campus method is at times also misleading as it purely depends on the academic performance of the students. Sometimes, students’ academic performance does not have an equivalent impact on their job performance. There are cases in which Wesker Innovations have ended up with non-performing employees as a result of using the campus method for recruitment. In addition, this recruitment method involves so many individuals in the recruitment chain, which makes the process unreliable at times (Roebuck 115).
The Growing Popularity of Social Media Recruitment
The social media platforms have made it easy for people to connect with one another. They have created new avenues through which people can relay information among themselves and across the world despite the wide geographical distance separating them. The recruitment field has not been left out as most firms seek to exploit the avenues created by social media to hire suitable employees.
Nowadays, employers have almost turned exclusively to using social media for recruitment purposes in their firms. This type of media has certainly grown from what it used to be in the last few decades to the most effective recruitment tool for most companies (Deb 144).
Through their personalised online connections, the firms use social media to hire and maintain their branding quotient. Most firms are convinced that social media makes it easier and faster to reach and select the right employees from a large group of potential workers. In addition, social media makes it easy to access talents that may not be aware of the current job openings (Roebuck 121).
The growing popularity of this type of recruitment can also be attributed to the high number of people who use the various social media platforms. Some researchers have noted that more people spend their time in social media than in the other traditional modes of passing information such as newspapers.
When firms post their logos and values on the social sites, they reach a large number people within a short time. The users become aware of such firms and whenever they post job openings, the information reaches them within a very short time (Deb 144).
Analyses of Social Media Recruitment
Types of Social Media Recruitment
The major types of social media recruitment that Wesker Innovations can use to hire employees include Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. The firm can use one or all of these social sites to post jobs, which are read by the social media users. In most cases, most of these users are potential employees who can be recruited by the firm (Howley 10).
Facebook is the leading site with almost 400 million users across the globe. Wesker Innovations can exploit the provisions given on Facebook to hire employees.
The firm can post its current open positions for free on its Facebook Page, the Facebook Marketplace, and other Facebook options. These provisions of Facebook can help the firm to find potential workers who are interested in its current positions (DuBrin 315).
Wesker Innovations can also use Twitter recruitment to hire employees whenever there are job vacancies. Twitter can work effectively for Wesker as it is a medium-sized firm. Twitter recruitment can assist the firm to get at the top of the competition by getting the necessary human resources it needs.
For this type of recruitment, Wesker will need to open a Twitter account and expand the account by developing relationships with job seekers and clients. The firm will then be required to tweet the available jobs to its Twitter followers whenever the vacancies arise (DuBrin 316).
Lastly, Wesker can also make use of LinkedIn to hire employees to fill the vacancies available. Unlike the first two types of social media, LinkedIn may require the firm to part with some money for the recruitment process. The firm needs to purchase job credits before getting a chance to use LinkedIn services. The job credits will allow the firm to post any available positions and search for suitable candidates.
The firm may also use LinkedIn for free by simply using its network activity box to announce any available vacancies to the users of the site. By using LinkedIn, Wesker can get a good chance to evaluate the potential candidates since their profiles and recommendations are already contained in the site (DuBrin 318).
Benefits and Opportunities
There are many benefits and opportunities that Weskers Innovations is likely to enjoy if it decides to take up social media recruitment. Firstly, social media recruitment is likely to improve the visibility of the firm’s jobs.
This is due to the fact that there are so many individuals who use social media, with a good number of them being potential workers. The big number, which consists of many qualified candidates, may be able to see the job openings of the firm whenever they are posted on the sites (Sweeney 14).
Secondly, recruiting employees via social media may assist Wesker to increase the quality of the hiring process within the firm. The users of social media easily adapt to changes in technology. Currently, innovative people are highly considered for most job openings; for that reason, Wesker may be able to hire such individuals, who are technically knowledgeable and innovative if only it used social media to recruit its employees (Sweeney 15).
Lastly, using social media to recruit employees may help Wesker Innovations to cut down the cost that it currently spends on campus recruitment. Unlike campus recruitment, which requires a lot of personnel and a great amount of money, social media recruitment is cheaper and at times, free.
For instance, there is no money involved in posting a job opening on Facebook. In the other types of social media recruitment such as LinkedIn, which require the use of money, the amount spent is not as much as that used up in the traditional recruitment methods (Sweeney 17).
Costs and Challenges
The first challenge that Wesker may face in social media recruitment is an unnecessary large number of applicants. Although it is at times beneficial to a recruiting company when too many individuals apply for a job, in most cases it is a disadvantage.
Many applicants lead to many inappropriate and irrelevant candidates, who waste the time of the firm’s recruitment team. To avoid such a situation, the firm may be forced to devise other measures such as candidate screening to use with social media recruitment (Armstrong 226).
Social media recruitment may result in unwanted comments about the firm from the media users and job seekers. These negative comments could destroy the reputation of the firm or even reduce its chances of getting the most qualified candidates; this is because many potential employees shy away from firms with a bad reputation.
The use of social media may also attract legal consequences especially in cases where the existing employees use them to view illegal content and engage in illicit conversations with external users of the firm’s sites and pages (Armstrong 228).
Unlike the traditional recruitment methods where employee hiring is guaranteed, social media recruitment may not work in some cases. It is difficult to fill job applications especially the ones that require the intervention of the recruitment personnel. However, a firm can design its social network page in a way that minimises this problem. The firm may be required to make the application procedures as short and clear as possible (Armstrong 229).
Effects by Implementing Social Media Recruitment
Quality of Candidates
There are so many ways through which Wesker Innovations can enhance the quality of candidates it hires via social media. Firstly, the firm should ensure that it chooses the right social network. For recruitment purposes, LinkedIn is the most appropriate as compared to other social networks.
LinkedIn is designed for professionals; for that reason, the firm should target this network as the first option. However, if the firm feels that its target groups are on other social networks, then it should consider them as well. According to Rutledge, for a firm to hire the most desirable individuals, it should go where they are (74).
Wesker can also improve the quality of the candidates it hires by ensuring that it targets the right applicants during a recruitment process. The firm can design its social media recruitment efforts in such a way that it only targets the most suitable candidates.
This can be done by using the right keywords; for instance, Wesker can reach a specific group of individuals by using Facebook Ads since only the candidates with the desired profiles get the chance to read them (Durai 143).
Lastly, Wesker can enhance the quality of its recruits for each vacancy by making the application process as simple as possible. A firm is likely to lose qualified candidates if the processes involved in a job application are complicated and excessively involving.
LinkedIn is the best social network in this case as it allows for interested individuals to apply for jobs directly from the postings whenever they appear. Wesker can also enhance the quality of employees by linking the openings directly to Twitter and Facebook posts (Rutledge 75).
Employees’ Retention
Social media recruitment enhances employee retention in a number of ways. Social media platforms encourage creativity among employees, which in turn assists in retaining them. If Wesker wishes to improve the retention of its employees, it should allow the existing employees to enjoy their jobs and appreciate them in everything they do in the firm. This is the best way through which the firm can enhance the loyalty of its workers (Scott and Jacka 59).
The use of social media within Wesker is also likely to encourage sharing of ideas among the employees. When the firm’s employees begin to share information among them, they are in a better position to handle any problem that comes up before it propagates to a serious difficulty that may negatively impact employee retention. The firm can do all that by initiating conversations through social media such as LinkedIn, where ideas can freely be exchanged (Scott and Jacka 61).
Wesker can also enhance employee retention within the firm by encouraging its workers to develop and maintain their social networks within the firm’s social sites. This way, the firm may be in a better position to access the employees’ transactions and communications, which may improve their personal branding and their roles within it. However, the firm should not control how the employees use their social networks as that may frustrate and stress them (Scott and Jacka 59).
Employer Branding
Human resource practices involve hiring, developing and retaining the best workers in a firm. Wesker should adopt such practices to ensure that it only retains the best individuals. Before the invention of social media, Wesker only had the option of relying on traditional methods to circulate information within the firm. The traditional methods have proved to be less efficient and have done very little in enhancing employee behaviour (Taylor 50).
To enhance employer branding, Wesker will have to adapt to the changing trend in employee behaviour. The firm can easily achieve this by relying exclusively on trust peer recommendations. The firm can easily establish relationships with its employees and other individuals outside the firm through social media. These relationships when fostered well can assist the firm to improve its branding (Taylor 50).
There are a lot of benefits that Wesker can reap if it uses social media for employer branding. First, the firm may get the chance to engage in a productive conversation that may attract potential candidates for a particular vacancy. Secondly, social media may help the firm to reach inactive individuals who can be potential employees in a particular field. Lastly, the use of social media can certainly enable the firm to create and maintain a common understanding between the employees, recruits and the firm’s management personnel (Taylor 51).
Conclusion
Social media recruitment is gaining popularity in most firms due to its ease of use and the benefits it has. Social media makes it fast and easy for firms to hire, develop and retain a qualified workforce that helps it to improve its overall performance. The major types of social media recruitment include Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
Wesker Innovations can use any or all of these social media sites to recruit the employees needed to fill the positions that emerge within the firm. Unlike the traditional campus recruitment that Wesker’s HR personnel applies in the hiring of workers, which is expensive and time consuming, social media recruitment is less costly and could also allow the firm to reach a large number of potential candidates within a short time in case of a vacant position.
Recommendations
- This report highly recommends that Wesker Innovations should change from using the traditional campus recruitment and adopt social media recruitment as it is both fast and cost efficient
- For vacancies that require professional employees, the firm should rely mostly on LinkedIn; the site is designed for professionals and consequently, Wesker can easily obtain such candidates from it. If the firm requires casual workers, it can resort to other social sites such as Facebook and Twitter.
- The firm can also recruit professional workers from other sites such as Facebook. However, the firm should redesign its Facebook page to ensure that its job adverts are only opened to the individuals whose profiles match the requirements of a particular job position.
Works Cited
Armstrong, Michael. Armstrong’s Handbook of Human Resource Management Practice. London: Kogen Page. Print.
Deb, Tapomoy. Strategic Approach to Human Resource Management Concepts, Tools and Application. New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers & Distributors, 2006. Print.
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Durai, Durai Pravin. Human Resource Management. New Delhi: Pearson Education India, 2007. Print.
Howley, Elaine. Harness the Power of Social Media: An Alternative Guide for Design & Construction Firms. Wayland, MA: ZweigWhite, 2010. Print.
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Rutledge, Patrice-Anne. Profiting from Social Networking. Upper Saddles River, NJ: FT Press, 2008. Print.
Scott, Peter, and Mike Jacka. Auditing Social Media: A Governance and Risk Guide. Hoboken, CA: John Wiley & Sons, 2011. Print.
Sweeney, Susan, and Randall Craig. Social Media for Business: 101 Ways to Grow Your Business Without Wasting Your Time. Gulf Breeze, FL: Maximum Press, 2011. Print.
Taylor, Stephen. People Resourcing. London: Chartered Inst. of Personnel and Development, 2005. Print.