Students' Awareness of Social Networks Profile Usage in Screening and Selecting Job Applicants (original) (raw)

Facebook Usage as Social Screening. Exploring the Approach of Admissions Officers from Management Colleges

The online social networks allow individuals to continuously create and model their self-presentations and representations. Facebook stands for a relevant example as people are given the uncensored opportunity to unfold their online selves according to their interests, preferences, goals and expectations. As a social networking site, Facebook is particularly used for reasons related to social documentation (social searching) and maintaining preexisting close relationships (bonding social capital) that imply knowledge of new information about persons met offline, and less for social exploration (social browsing) that refers to using Facebook to initiate new contacts. The extant recent literature often approach the usage of Facebook as a pre-employment screening tool with a view to select the fittest candidates for the job. Still, there are few studies which address the professors’ endeavor to use social media, in general and Facebook, in particular, as a complementary criterion when selecting future students. At this level, Facebook profiles are liable to stand for cogent indicators for the prospects’ personalities and potential, for their predispositions and professional perspectives. Starting from this point, the current research aims at investigating the approaches on the aforementioned issue of several professors from Management colleges in Romania who are in charge of settling the evaluation reference points of the college admissions procedure. The research is the more relevant so as the future graduate managers should possess some key characteristics which may be anticipated or pre-assessed based on their Facebook profile cues. In order to test the subjects’ openness to consider the implications of Facebook usage as a thorough social documentation tool, nineteen in-depth interviews were conducted. The findings show that there is a high degree of skepticism towards using Facebook as a source of reliable information.

Factors Affecting Applicants' Reactions to the Collection of Data in Social Network

Social networking sites (SNWS) have become extremely popular, particularly among young Americans. The largest social network site, Facebook, had more than 800 million active users as of September 2011 ("Facebook Inc, News", 2011). With an increase in the number of users and amount of information that is readily available, hiring managers are looking to social networking sites to gain insights into potential and existing employees. Academic researchers have begun to study the prevalence of information contained within social networking sites, ethical questions about it, and the lack of awareness regarding the use of it (e.g., Brown & Vaughn, 2011; Davison, Marist, & Bing, 2011; Kluemper & Rosen, 2009). The use of this information in human resource decisions has implications for organizations, job applicants, and the public as a whole. For instance, organizations are increasingly using data on SNWS to make employment decisions about individuals. However, individuals may perceive that the use of these data for employment purposes is an invasion of privacy because most of the data in SNWS are disclosed for personal purposes. As a result, they may react negatively to organizations that use these systems. Thus, through an extension of the privacy model (Stone & Stone, 1990), we consider a number of factors that may affect applicants' reactions to the use of SNWS, and make predictions to guide research on the issue. We also discuss fair human resource policies that organizations can use to ameliorate these potential problems.

Analysing applicant's attraction with social networks on both sides of the table: those who recruit and those who are recruited have a compatible performance?

2016

Applicant’s attraction in recruitment is perhaps one of the best known areas that integrate knowledge from different fields of research, such as the HRM, Communication and Work and Organizational Psychology. Under this thematic, the social networks (SN) began to be understood as useful for recruitment purposes. The main objective of this research is to describe and understand the compatibility between the practices of recruiters regarding applicant’s attraction using SN and the expectations of the latter ones when looking for jobs via SN. This work has allowed us to generate a set of considerations regarding the theoretical, empirical and practical levels.

The use of Social Network Sites for the Employment Seeking Process

Proceedings of the 12th International Academic Conference, 2014

Social networks are becoming more and more important in employment seeking process. The importance of social networks in this respect has been researched also in academic research worldwide and discussed on scientific conferences. The aim of the paper is to analyse the experience of the use of social network sites (SNS) with empirical results of 28 interviews with employment seeking individuals to identify the behaviour of employment seeking individuals and to identify further information regarding the employment seeking process in SNSs. In addition is an objective of the paper to falsify the dimensions of Sander / Teh. That the framework of the dimensions can be used to investigate SNSs and to describe the social capital theory of SNSs (Sander & Teh 2014a). The importance of real social networks are presented in many papers but the perspective of the employment seeking individual in SNSs needs further and deeper research.

Opinions of University Graduates about Social Networks According to Their Personal Characteristics

Turkish Online Journal of Educational Technology Tojet, 2011

This research aims to determine opinions of university graduates about social networks according to their personal characteristics. The research was conducted on 203 university graduates who received teacher training at Sakarya University in 2010-2011 academic year. Two different data collection tools were administered to the participating university graduates and correlation analysis was conducted in light of data collected from the tools above. As is widely accepted by the technology users, Facebook, the most used social network in Turkey and across the world, was selected as the social network for the research. A positive and significant relationship was found among Facebook-related opinions stated by university graduates having an extravert personality as a result of data collected through the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire-Revised/Short-Form and Opinions of University Graduates about Social Networks data collection tools.

Applicant reactions to social network web use in personnel selection and assessment

Revista de Psicología del Trabajo y de las Organizaciones

Human Resource (HR) professionals are increasingly using Social Networking Websites (SNWs) for personnel recruitment and selection processes. However, evidence is required regarding their psychometric properties and their impact on applicant reactions. In this paper we present and discuss the results of exploring applicant reactions to either the use of a professional SNW (such as LinkedIn) or a non-professional SNW (such as Facebook). A scale for assessing applicant reactions was applied to 124 professionals. The results showed more positive attitudes to the use of professional SNWs compared with non-professional SNWs. Both gender and age moderated these results, with females and young applicants having a less positive attitude than males and older participants towards the use of non-professional SNWs.

Perceived Effectiveness of Social Networks for Job Search

Libri, 2015

One of the most common uses of the social networks' capabilities is for professional, study and business purposes. The literature presents conflicting evidence as to the effectiveness of different networks for professional purposes. Therefore, our primary research aim is to conduct a comparative investigation of the effectiveness and factors which influence the effectiveness of different social networks for finding a job. This study focuses on the two most popular networks, Facebook and LinkedIn; the former is not intended specifically for professional purposes while the latter is. To this end, we conducted a user study based on over 220 responses to a questionnaire especially designed for this goal. In our analysis, we distinguish and compare between the users' perception and attitudes toward the effectiveness of the network and its actual helpfulness for finding a job in the past experience. Our results indicate that different demographic and network usage variables influenced the attitude to effectiveness and helpfulness of the networks. Thus, users with lower incomes preferred Facebook, while more educated users with higher incomes perceived LinkedIn as more effective. Interestingly, we found that despite the fact that LinkedIn was perceived as significantly more effective for finding a job by the majority of the users, the actual helpfulness of the two networks was assessed as quite similar. Our findings provide a direct evidence for bridging social capital increase by online social networks. This study has practical implications and recommendations that will enable job candidates to improve their job-hunting strategies.

Measuring University Students' Awareness of Finding Jobs through Social Network Sites Use

Nowadays, there is a growth of creating new accounts in social network sites (SNSs) specially by young people among whom are university students. SNSs (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Myspace and so many others) are useful communication tools in which people exchange ideas in their areas of interest. This incredible growth of using these applications makes it significant to investigate specific personal or professional purposes. The purpose of this study was to investigate the extent of awareness among university students for finding jobs through using SNSs. The targeted group was undergraduate and graduate Türkiye Scholarship holders at Ege University, Izmir-Turkey for the spring semester 2014-2015. Two variables were explored: their current ways and awareness of using SNSs for finding jobs. The method applied in this study was quantitative in nature; a web questionnaire was shared through Facebook and randomly 61 participants responded to it who are about 14% of the total number. The data was analyzed by using the SPSS program 19. However, many users have already joined groups and pages in SNSs concerning jobs. The results indicate that there is a lack of awareness among them towards finding jobs and only 14.8% of them who have already been hired as a result of using SNSs. Further; they use SNSs for personal matters rather than professional ones.