International Journal of Scientific & Engineering Research, Volume 4, Issue 1Ř, ŽŒŽmber-2013

ISSN 2229-5518

Innovation in recruitment solutions on social networking sites

Ankur Balar, Nikita Malviya, Swadesh Prasad, Siddharth Patil

Abstract— Social networking websites are among the most prominent reasons for majority of adults to be on internet. With considerable global reach, social networking sites are not limited to only sharing photos, comments and likes. These sites are increasingly discovering innovative ways to utilize this reach to benefit both applicants and recruiters for marketing communication, increase brand influence and recruitment. The paper aims to demonstrate limitations in the current social networking based recruitment systems and proposes a new paradigm to see the social recruitment from the perspective of the applicant rather than the recruiter. Owing to the wide reach of social networking sites, many recruiters have started promoting their brand, engaging their customer base and hiring potential candidates. Social networking sites offer recruiters deeper insight into the personality of the potential candidates and uncover digital dirt. From the applicant’s perspective, they can communicate and engage recruiters to understand the opportunities offered rather than applying for jobs through conventional channels. In the existing system an applicant must search on individual employer’s social networking site page for the jobs that are offered. Moreover, there is no way to search for all the jobs based on candidate’s area of interest. The objective of this paper is to achieve customizability, flexibility and applicant friendliness by developing a platform where candidates can actively engage, discuss and share experiences around the recruiters work culture and jobs offered. The proposed solution is a win-win approach for both applicant and recruiters.

Index Terms— Innovation; Candidate; Recruiter; Hiring; Online Recruitment; Social Networking; Jobs.

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1 INTRODUCTION

Sthe landscape of recruitment both for recruiters and

OCIAL and online technologies have continued to change
jobseeking candidates. Various academics researchers in- cluding Cober, R.T., Brown, D.J., Blumental, A.J., Doverspike, D., & Levy, P. (2000) predicted that online recruitment trends will continue to replace conventional recruitment methods such as printed media ads and job fairs.
Online recruitment started with simple job posting websites where recruiters would post jobs with their contact infor- mation and wait for the candidates to find these postings and apply. This first wave of online recruiting is popularly known as Job Boards and it includes sites such as ‘Monster’ and ‘Ca- reer Builder’. Job Boards had no process to filter the appli- cants. The second wave of online recruitment tools was job aggregators. Job aggregators were job sites that would collect jobs posted at several job boards and would let job seeking candidates apply. Job aggregators had advantage of having a higher reach of actively job seeking candidates. Job aggrega- tors such as ‘Simply Hired’ and ‘Indeed’ had no way to reach passive job seeking candidates. The next evolutionary wave of online recruitment is professional networking sites such as
‘LinkedIn’. Professional networking sites has advantage of letting candidates network with like-minded professionals but still lacks a way for recruiters to seek passive job seekers. Fi- nally the evolution of online recruiting has reached up to So- cial Recruiting. Social Networking sites are among the most visited sites across the globe. With higher reachability it has both active and passive job seeking candidates as its members. Social recruitment is relatively a new idea and various compa- nies such as ‘Jobvite’, ‘Bullhorn’ and ‘Work4’ have developed applications that integrate with social networking sites such as
‘Facebook’ are a boon for recruiters and it lets recruiters reach a higher number of both active and passive job seeking candi- dates. It does not see however the whole social recruitment
scenario from perspective of job seeking candidates.

2 IMPACT OF SOCAL DYNAMICS

Social networking sites such as ‘Facebook’ have nearly 80 per- cent of all internet using adults as its members. All these members are tightly interconnected both professionally and personally with each other. Social networking site users rea- son that using these sites is private business and searching for job online can be attributed to be a public activity. However, this is completely opinion based division. Logically, whatever is discussed and shared online it automatically goes to public domain. Currently, the highest number of visited websites is social networking sites and these sites have evolved from the sole need of networking and connecting to people. The dawn of social hiring is the next step in the recruitment scenario.

3 NEED FOR PROJECT

Various applications (called as Apps) have been developed that uses the platform and features provided by social net- working sites. These apps typically allow the recruiters to add a ‘job’ or ‘opportunities’ link on their social pages. Any job seeker who has liked or subscribed to the recruiters page gets constant updates about the new jobs that are posted. Job seek- ers can apply to the jobs directly from within this page with- out ever have to leave this page. This eases recruiters by com- municating the opportunities available in the organization directly to the candidates who already are inspired by the or- ganizations brand and have liked the page. This also eases the job seeking experience of job seekers because they can apply for the opportunities at the organizations they like without ever have to leave the social networking site. This is a consid- erable boon in the experience of job application to the job seekers because on an average most of the job seekers already are spending their time on these sites.

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International Journal of Scientific & Engineering Research Volume 4, Issue 1Řǰȱ ŽŒŽ–‹Ž›ȬŘŖŗřȱ

ISSN 2229-5518

2145

While easing the recruitment process for both the parties so- cial recruiting is missing one very important aspect of job seeking experience for the candidates. The job seekers on so- cial networking websites must ‘like’ the organizations page to receive updates about the opportunities in that organization. This means that in the conventional scenario candidates seek- ing jobs using social networking websites are limited to oppor- tunities of only those organizations that candidate is aware of and following. This is useful from the perspective of recruiters because they get to connect with job seeking candidates who already know about their organization and ideally would be more motivated to work with the organization than an aver- age candidate. From the perspective of job seeker, however, we believe that job seeking experience is not efficient and job seekers would miss out on several opportunities continuously being posted across the vast network of Social networking sites only because the candidate is not following the organiza- tion. In simple words this is a boon for passive job seeking candidates whereas curse for active job seeking candidates. A project is needed that addresses this issue. The proposed pro- ject in the shape of an ‘App’ must improve the job search effi- ciency of the active job seeking candidates.

4 PROJECT OVERVIEW


This App will have many similar properties and work flows that are similar to already existing Apps that are used for so- cial recruiting. The following flow diagram summarizes the current behavior of Apps.

ber of job seeking candidates subscribing to Projects social Page. On the other hand of this two sided platform, job seek- ing candidates will receive increasing benefits as more social recruiters connect with the Project Page to post new opportu- nities. Eventually, this project page will be a repository of a huge number of jobs that can be easily searched using various analytics tools such as ‘graph search’ in Facebook by a huge number of job seeking candidates who are subscribed to the project social page.

ER

Fig. 1. Workflow of existing system.

In the scenario illustrated in Fig 1. The job seeker must have knowledge of several organizations to know about opportuni- ties that he/she is interested in.
The proposed Project presents a new workflow.
As illustrated in Fig 2. An ‘App’ needs to be developed that not only allows a recruiter to post jobs on the organizations social website but also automatically posts the jobs on another page (let’s call it ‘Project’ social Page to avoid any confusion). This Project Page will be subscribed by several job seeking candidates and will act as a repository of jobs posted cumula- tively by several organizations. This Project page will also act as dual sided platform as illustrated in Fig 3. As can be ob- served from Fig 3, this platform will provide increasingly higher benefit to social recruiters because of increasing num-

Fig. 2. Workflow of Proposed system.

The analytics feature provided by social networking sites can also be used by recruiters to search and reach larger number of active job seeking candidates.

5 FUTURE WORK

Using security features provided by social networking sites both recruiters and candidates can control and limit the amount of updates they receive from the project page. As the security infrastructure provided by social networking sites gives higher control of various aspects related to both job post- ing for recruiters and job applications for job seeking candi- dates, both candidates and recruiters can engage in dialogs

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International Journal of Scientific & Engineering Research Volume 4, Issue 1Řǰȱ ŽŒŽ–‹Ž›ȬŘŖŗřȱ

ISSN 2229-5518

2146


platform both, the job seeking candidates and the recruiters will benefit, as more of both connect to the project page. In future this project can be enhanced by integration of addition- al options such allowing the recruiters and candidates to communicate privately or publically within the App. Such enhancements will require additional security and privacy related infrastructure provided by social networking sites. This project will help to develop a community where recruit- ers and candidates engage in dialogs with each other to devel- op better understanding of each party and harness the benefits from social networking between candidates and recruiters.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

The authors wish to thank A, B, C. This work was supported in part by a grant from XYZ.

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Fig. 3. Proposed architecture of the two-sided platform.

related to the opportunities that have been posted. These dis- cussions can be kept private or public as necessary. An inclu- sion of referrals to recruiters also needs to be devised which is currently not possible using the platform that is provided by social networking sites. This referral mechanism will allow job seeking candidates to be referred by their contacts to the re- cruiters for the posted positions by recruiters thereby harness- ing the power of social networking.

6 CONCLUSION

A large number of people are connected with each other on social networking sites such as Facebook. This population in- cludes both active and passive job seeking candidate. Using recruitment strategies based on social networking sites, re- cruiters can connect to this large number of job seeking candi- date pool and vice versa candidates can connect to a large number of recruiters. Using the proposed project based on social networking sites, the job seeking experience of the ‘ac- tive’ job seeking candidates can substantially be improved. This project proposes development of a two-sided platform in the shape of a plugin (popularly known as App) for social networking sites such as Facebook. By using this two-sided

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