Suppose that you are the administrator at a health care facility. A department m

Question

Suppose that you are the administrator at a health care facility. A department manager comes to you with the idea that the facility should be using social media (such as Facebook, Twitter, etc.,) to pre-screen job applicants. From the administrator’s perspective, describe at least one benefit and one concern you have about implementing this. What recommendation would you make to your HR department, and why?

With the omnipresence of social media in modern society, potential employer monitoring of social media activity might have huge implications. Read through all of your classmates’ initial posts and choose at least two to comment on. In your response, craft your recommendation that will be made to your HR department.

Explanation / Answer

There are both positives and negatives about pre-screening of candidates from the social media.

First, let us discuss the positive. When we get the access to the social media page of potential candidates, we can get so many information regarding the candidates which were otherwise not available from the formal recruitment process. In a formal recruitment process, the candidate can refine the information or present himself/ herself in a way that is best suited from the recruiters' perspectives. But the social media data, especially when the recruiter or the hiring company have the option of analyzing it with social media analytics tools, can give rise to a comprehensive personality profile of a candidate which the hiring company can check whether is in sync with the company culture. It is very crucial (if not the most crucial) to have the candidates' personality in sync with the company culture for a selection to become fruitful and longlasting.

One of the major cons of recruiting through the social media is the risk of misinterpreting or using prohibited information. There are many information in the social media which, legally, a hiring manager must not use because it will discriminate the candidates. This includes information such as the applicant’s race, gender, religion or membership in some other protected class. This is unlawful to make this information a part of the selection process and also it is very difficult to explain to the regulators that this information, though collected, is not used as relevant for the selection process.

To avoid this pitfall, our recommendation is to first define and approve a social media hiring policy (a comprehensive standard which can be referred as a document irrespective of the individual hiring managers' perspective) which includes the definition of social media platform search and will keep track of employment decisions and social media information. A comprehensive IT system can also be built or bought which can capture only the requisite information from the social media and can perform a candidate profiling similar to the segmentation activities done for the customers in the marketing domain.

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