Companies are finding candidates through searches of LinkedIn profiles. They also use LinkedIn and other social media to screen candidates. Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of using social media as a recruitment channel. Use facts to support your arguments.

 

Recruitment and selection through social media platforms, such as LinkedIn have become common, with most organizations. Some of the advantages and disadvantages of social media recruitment are as discussed below;

Advantages.

• Using social media reduces the cost of recruitment.

Carrying out recruitment via social media, enables organizations to evade various costs. The employers do not have to pay for adverts in the mainstream media such as television and radios. They also do not have to arrange for sittings with the candidates to select the best for subjection to the interview stage. With these costs avoided, the recruitment cost becomes cheaper for the organization.

• Social media enable organizations to reach out to more candidates.

Social media has got more followers than traditional advertisement forums. An organization that makes use of social media such as Facebook is in a position to reach more applicants as compared to using mainstream media such as newspapers. Reaching out to more candidates offers, a greater opportunity for the organization to recruit high-quality candidates.

• Social media also reduces recruitment time.

Traditional recruitment platform was lengthy and took time from making an advertisement for the position and allowing people to apply before conducting interviews. When using social media, the advertisement, is linked to the application. Employees apply as soon as they see the advert and the application is received immediately for consideration. The use of social media makes the recruitment exercise that would take weeks to take just days.

• Social media increases the job visibility of an organization as well as its enabling an organization brand itself.

When a job advert is made via social media, many qualified candidates are in a position to view it. The greater the number of viewers, the wider the selection sample that guarantees better quality candidates. An organization also brands itself when it makes an advert on social media, and that makes it more recognized. Social media would therefore be considered a branding and marketing platform for organizations.

Disadvantages.

• Social media recruitment is faced with insecurity on the employees' and employers' information.

Some of the platforms, especially Facebook, have poor security features and are accessible to the public. The displayed information on the organization and employees would be easily wrongly used by unintended persons. That makes social media recruitment a risky platform for both the employer and employee who would risk their information falling into the wrong hands.

• Organizations receive high volumes of responses that may be difficult to go through.

The larger the number of people who view a job advert on social media, the larger number of applications expected. Some of the candidates would have not met the requirements but still apply. Sorting out all the applications is tedious, and organizations have to go through all of them for identification of the best candidates for the jobs.

• Sometimes organizations may fail to have stable technological equipment for effective social media recruitment.

For stable recruitment using social media, an organization requires stable internet and computer systems. Weak systems would not handle the huge volumes of applications made. These systems are costly and would lead to organizations incurring extra cost to install.

• Employees may provide false information on social media recruitment platforms.

When employees are not physically recruited, they may provide false information or have other people take their tests on their behalf. Organizations would end up recruiting wrong candidates based on false information. That would be detrimental to the future performance of the organization.