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Security Guide

SeCurinG SoCial reCruitinG

Social media has fundamentally changed the way show which skills the candidate might be good at. Employers
companies recruit and hire. Before social media, employers can also use candidates’ SM sites, particularly Facebook and
would post a job opening on job boards or newspapers and Twitter, to get a sense of the candidate as a person. They may
receive a huge stack of paper resumes. Candidates were eval- reveal potential behavior or attitude problems.
uated based on these paper resumes. If it was an important Reppler, a social networking image management com-
job, the company might call a couple of references. A poorly pany, reports that 91 percent of employers it surveyed used
placed job advertisement resulted in no applications at all. It social media to screen candidates. Furthermore, 69 percent
was a slow and expensive process full of unknowns. of survey respondents reported that they had rejected can-
Recruiting was risky because employers never knew for didates because of what they had on social media sites, but,
sure if a candidate was truthful about his or her listed skills, on the positive side, 68 percent also reported that they had
social interactions with coworkers, employment history, hired a candidate in part because of the content of that per-
or educational background. Recruiters needed to know son’s social networking site. 47
whether candidates could walk the talk. It was also
hard to find the best employees for the job, and
recruiting budgets were limited.
Employers can now use social media sites like
LinkedIn to hire the best people more quickly and
at a lower cost. For about $700 a month, recruiters
can search through 300 million LinkedIn members
45
to find the perfect candidate. That $700 a month
may sound like a lot to you, but to corporate cus-
tomers, it’s peanuts. The cost of hiring just one new
46
employee runs around $4,000. If an independent
recruiting company is involved, that cost can be as
high as 10 percent of the new employee’s salary.
LinkedIn also gives employers access to “passive”
candidates who might not be looking for a job but
are a perfect fit for a particular position. Once hired,
the employer can leverage that new employee’s so-
cial network to hire more candidates just like him
or her.
Through social media, employers can also get a
more detailed and accurate work history. They can
tell if a candidate got along with his or her cowork-
ers by looking at recommendations. Endorsements
Source: Derren Nugent/Retna/Photoshot/Newscom

45 LinkedIn Talent Solutions, “Recruiter,” accessed May 26, 2014, http://business.linkedin.com/talent-solutions/products/recruiter.html.
46 Erika Welz Prafder, “Hiring Your First Employee,” Entrepreneur.com, accessed May 26, 2014, www.entrepreneur.com/article/83774.
47
“Managing Your Online Image Across Social Networks,” The Reppler Effect, http://blog.reppler.com/2011/09/27/managing-your-online-
image-across-social-networks/.
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