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Social Media and Recruitment

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Perspectives in Language, Linguistics and Media 1 (2016) 25-33

Social Media and Recruitment

Humera siddiqi 1, Aftab Alam2

_____________________________________________________________________________
Abstract

With one billion users over internet around the world and development of social media has
provided an easy and economical platform for individuals and organization to connect together.
The primary goal of this study is to enlighten the modern trends of recruiting which also include
recruitment through social networking sites. Communication through social media involves the
use of social networking sites that enable people to communicate usually for social purpose with
a web based technology and offers an opportunity to interact over the internet. The present
research aims to focus on new ways of recruiting and its effectiveness, advantages such as
accessibility and its impact on management. It analyzes the relationship between social media
and recruitment and its impacts. It also presents the findings of descriptive research involving
the views of job seekers as well as the views of organizations regarding social media as a
recruiting tool. The study is helpful in understanding the effectiveness of social media recruiting
and its impact on the organization to achieve optimum utilization of human capital.

Key words: Social media, social media recruitment, Social networking sites

Literature Review
For an organization to attain advantage in market, it needs to retain and engage human resource by
meliorating access to the best human resource. In other words we can also say that by engaging human
resource informally, organizations grab the attention of interested groups and individual to stay
connected with the organization for opportunities and news, this strategy of organization is carried out in
contemporary world with the help of institutional advertising through social media and networking sites.
Organizational requirement to hire human resource and its sources are variables of deep interest to

1
Corresponding Author: Humera Siddiqi , humera@qau.edu.pk , Quaid-i -AzamSchool of Management Sciences

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accomplish the requisite of human resource for competitive advantage (Harris N. A., 2013). In the era of
globalization, robust competition and paradigm shift in human resource management strategies,
companies have to adopt new strategies to evolve and develop constantly. In this situation existing
recruitment methods and techniques have been replaced by new methods and sources including Job
boards, Social media sites and the internet.
The acquisition of human resource is an extensive process, it include identifying the candidate (human
capital) , communicating check candidates profile and screening by comparing possessed skills to
organizational need. Organizational strategies to hire human resource are of paramount interest, a current
technique to hire this human resource leads to use of different tools (Holm, 2014). Social media happens to
be one of the sources which facilitated the need of organization to establish a relationship with individual,
groups and institutions. Organization has been implementing advertising tactics include institutional
awareness and job advertising with the help of websites, newspapers and other media (Rachel W. Y. Yee,
2010). With the emergence of social sites a new media source is adopted by the organizations to advertise
job vacancies. Furthermore not only the social media sites helps in advertising job positions but also find the
needs and demands of prospective skills in various industries by providing information about the history,
culture and products of the companies (Kumar, 2008).

Recruitment-2022 a report on the effect of social media and recruitment prepared by Recruitment &
Employment Confederation in 2013, tell us about the future recruitment challenges and changing
processes of recruitment. The massage in this report assist us in understanding future demands of human
resource and argue that “ the talent will be selected on the proof that they will deliver the required task,
and automatic personality profiling by a screening and verification process”. Furthermore the report also
gives information about the sensitive of information on social media and time invested by candidate to
search a relevant job to his/her expertise will be a valuable fuel for timely, accurate and transparent
communication between job seekers and employers (REC, 2013). Social media is paramount source of
attracting masses around the world to make a personal profile to connect with different people and
groups. A survey done by Insight Series found that almost 74% of professionals around the world are
maintaining Facebook profile. Twitter and Instagram has also played a huge role in controlling huge
market share in social networking ranks. LinkedIn also has a vast number of members including 85% of
jobseekers taking part in searching for opportunities. On the other hand 69% of professionals also have
Social network feeds on LinkedIn. Survey also finds that 9 out of 10 LinkedIn members are happy to
communicate with employers and friends for jobs and 80% of total members apply for relevant positions.
The report suggest that only posting a job advertisement is not enough on social media but employers
must be able to provide information about job descriptions, history of organization, culture, financial and

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non-financial rewards and future plans (WALTERS, 2014).

Researchers have also questions about the credibility of information and legal issues related to social media.
The profiles on social media are typically made for social purposes there for the information available on the
social media could be unrelated to work performance. The attitude of candidate may become negative and
might perceive as an invasion of privacy (Gibbs, 2015). Organization has mitigating the privacy issue by
creating their own job portal by creating relationships to their human resource information system. Social
media has been providing assistance in the form of hiring successful employees and increasing brand
awareness with providing effective channel of communication.

Theoretical frame work:

Social Media Recruitment

Hypothesis:

H1: There is a relation between Social Media and Recruitment

The theoretical frame work of our study shows a relationship between social media and
recruitment. For this study our dependent variable will be recruitment and social media is our
independent variable.

Methodology:

The research is part of Human resource management course at Quaid-e-Azam University. This
descriptive study utilize multiple scientific publications, reports and primary information collect
through structured questionnaires in electronic form which was distributed through web. Social media
was taken as independent variable and Recruitment was taken as dependent variable, both consisted of
nine items each which were adopted from (Broughton, Foley, Ledermaier, & Cox, 2013). The
population of study was individual of Islamabad related to different organization. The 50
questionnaire were distributed out of with 3 were not properly filled and 2 were not received which
tell us the response rate was 90%. The study will also use SPSS tool for statistical analysis. Both
dependent and independent variables were measured on a five-point Likert scale with range from (1)
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strongly disagree to (5) ‘Strongly agree’. Other than the measurement of variables the demographic
section was also included in the questionnaire which was composed of gender, level of education of
employees, industry they work in and social media site they mostly use. To test the major hypothesis
correlation test was use and regressions analysis to check the variation of data. The statistical used in
the study was SPSS which assisted us in finding the correlation between variable in addition to that the
Cronbach’s alpha was also calculated to check the reliability between variables. The regression test
was also included in the research to test the variation in the data. Apart from reliability and variation
factor analysis was also tested to check the reliability of scale followed with the descriptive statistic of
demographic section.

Results
Table: 1

Demographics
Characteristics Frequency Percent %

Gender
MALE 26 57.8
FEMALE 19 42.2
Age
21-30 17 37.8
31-40 18 40
41-50 8 17.8
ABOVE 51 2 4.4
Education
BACHELORS 16 35.6
MASTERS 25 55.6
MS/MPHIL 2 4.4
PHD 1 2.2
Industry
Private 21 46.7
Public 24 53.3
Social Media Site
Facebook 38 84.4
Twitter 5 11.1
LinkedIn 2 4.4

The above table gives information about the demographic distribution of respondents who participated
in the study by filling the electronic questionnaire. Results show that out of 45 respondents 57.8% were
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Male and 42.2% were female. The education of most of the respondents was above Bachelors. The ratio
of age group between 20 and 40 was the highest which share 77.8% of total sample. The difference was
also analyzed between respective industries of respondents in which 53.3% were related to public
organization and 46.7 were related to private industry. Lastly a distribution was made about the usage of
social media in which 38 respondents agreed to use Facebook.

Factor Analysis

Items Component 1 Component 2 Cronbach's Alpha

Recruitment 0.862
RT1 0.539
RT2 0.706
RT3 0.794
RT4 0.702
RT5 0.814
RT6 0.834
RT7 0.778
RT8 0.731
RT9 0.879
Social Media 0.894
SM1 0.881
SM2 0.809
SM3 0.606
SM4 0.721
SM5 0.482
SM6 0.614
SM7 0.745
SM8 0.626
SM9 0.745

Measure of recruitment and social media

The purpose of factor analysis was to check the factors for variance in each variable that is accounted for.
The factor from RT1 to RT9 was related to recruitment and from SM1 to SM9 defines the social media.
The component in both recruitment and social media is high which indicates that the extracted
components represent the variables well. The principle component method was used which indicates the
variation in the components of variable.
The Cronbach’s alpha was also shown in the table which is 0.862 for recruitment and 0.894 for social
media. The high Cronbach’s alpha shows the consistency between the variables
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Table: 3
Correlations
RECRUITMENT SOCIALMEDIA
RECRUITMENTPearson Correlation 1
Sig. (2-tailed)
N 44
SOCIALMEDIA Pearson Correlation .597** 1
Sig. (2-tailed) 0
N 44 44
**. Correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed).

The correlation between recruitment and social media is .597 which is significant at 0.01 level. This
means that there is a moderate relationship between recruitment and social media. It means that changes
in one variable are correlated with changes in the second variable. In above table, Pearson’s r is 0.597
which distant to 1. For this reason, we can conclude that there is a moderate relationship between
recruitment and social media variables. Hence the correlation analysis result confirmed that hypothesis 1
(H1) is accepted.

Table: 4
Regression Analysis

Coefficients a

Standardized
Unstandardized Coefficients Coefficients

B Std. Error Beta

Model t Sig.

1 (Constant) 1.084 .524 2.068 .045

a. Dependent Variable: RECRUITMENT

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Table 4 shows that recruitment has a positive relationship with social media and that increase
recruitment leads to an increase in social media by 0.685 units. The Significance shows the goodness of
data. T The significance value of the t statistic is less than 0.045, which means that the variation
explained by the model is not due to chance.

Table: 5
Model Summary
Model R R Square Adjusted R Square Std. Error of the
Estimate
1 .597a 0.357 0.341 0.63129

a. Predictors: (Constant), SOCIALMEDIA

This table provides the R and R2 values. The R is the multiple correlations between the observed and
model-predicted values of the dependent variable. It is 0.597 which is medium value indicates a
moderate relationship. R Square, the coefficient of determination, is the squared value of the multiple
correlation coefficients. It shows that about 0.357 of variation in time is explained by the model.

Discussion
The study reviles that the relationship between recruitment and social media is positive with the moderate
degree. Since the factors use to measure the recruitment were cost of recruitment, talent needs and
information about job. These factors were reliable to measure the recruitment variable because they show
a high degree of reliability show in factor analysis table. The case of social media had also three factors
which include access of information and reliability, use of social media to search jobs and privacy
concerns of individual in using social media. The respondent believes that social media specifically
“Facebook” is being use for only personal purposes but they like to get information related to
recruitments and job positions. The respondents also believe that social media is cost effective when we
want to advertise job positions, apart from that the degree of spreading of information is being done to a
wide range of receivers through social media which helps recruiters to pool a wide range of candidates
into screening process.

Furthermore the study also reveals that most of the organization doesn’t follow social media as a
recruiting tool because of irrelevant and fake information due to user generated media. The information
available on social media is also not authentic since it can’t be verified. The research also found that both

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male and female are frequently using social media for personal purpose but they don’t wish that any of a
recruiter must adopt information from their page that could be used in recruitment process.
The study also shows that most of the job candidates who apply through social media are willing to make
it as a formal tool in recruiting because it offers quick information about individual not only about their
skills but also about their interests, likings, and future concerns which are indeed very useful for the
organization to retain talent and mitigate turnover (PANDEY, 2012).

Limitations
The presented research is not without limitation as it is presented in the situation of academic purposes.
The research was conducted in geography of Islamabad. Due to lack of requirements like finance and
time it is limited to certain situation. The measurement of recruitment can be done with different factors
as well as the social media can also be studied under various other factors. The research primarily focused
on limited number of sample size which can be increased in future research. Moreover the tests and
results were generated through SPSS and limited number of results was included. The research can be
done in quantitate standards to analyze results for further uses.

Future Implications
The research can be extended taking sample from different nature of organizations. Relation between
Recruitment and social media could be compared in other geographical areas by to replicate results.
Furthermore research on recruitment and importance of information can be conducted by generalizing
different factors related. The study can be replicated with bigger sample size. The model developed can
be tested with different scaling method. Further research on employer behavior and adoption patterns
would help in understanding other factors sharing influence on organization.

Recommendations
Social media has been revolutionizing the organizational strategies for last one decade. It is of
paramount importance to study social media to get benefit from it for organizational effectiveness.
Indeed human resource is an integral part of every organization and it is must for every organization to
recruit talented and efficient individuals and groups to attain competitive advantage in market. Since a
high number of users available on social media it has become a house of diversity. Skills, experiences
and abilities which are need for the organizations are available in diverse and enormous amount. To
utilize this opportunity and to maintain competitive advantage studying social media with different
organizational is very essential.

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References

Broughton, A., Foley, B., Ledermaier, S., & Cox, A. (2013). The use of social media in the
recruitment process. London: ACAS.

Gopalia, A. (2012). Effectiveness of Online Recruitment and Selection Process. Oxford Brookes
University.

Harris, M. M. (2003). Research on Internet Recruiting and Testing: Current status and future Directions.
International Review of Industrial and Organizational Psychology, 16, 131-165.

Harris, N. A. (2013). Building a positive candidate experience: towards a networked model of e-

recruitment. JOURNAL OF BUSINESS STRATEGY, 34, 36-47.

Holm, A. B. (2014). Institutional context and e-recruitment practices of Danish organizations. Employee,
432-455.

Management, R. (2010). Organizational Effectiveness. Leadership Insight.

Oragan, D. (2007). A reappraisal and reinterpretation of the satisfaction-causes-performance. Academy of

Management Review, 46-53.

PANDEY, C. (2012). IMPACT OF JOB SATISFACTION AND ORGANIZATIONAL. International

Journal of Social Science & Interdisciplinary Research, 1(8), 26-41.

Rachel W. Y. Yee, T. C. (2010). The Impact of Employee Satisfaction on Quality and Profitability.
Journal of Human Resource Management.

REC. (2013). Recruitment – 2022. London: Industry Unit research.

Ventura, M. G., & Bringula, R. P. (2013). Effectiveness of Online Job Recruitment System. International
Journal of Computer Science, 10(4), 152-159.

WALTERS, R. (2014). Using social media in recruitment process.

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