Free Essay about Social Media Influence on Job Market

Top social media sites for business

Social media has been recently associated with various effects on the job sector. Social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Google +, Instagram, and LinkedIn have been used by both employers and job-seekers to communicate the available opportunities in the market. Also, different companies have made it easier for the job seeker to access the available opportunities easily through their pages (Ali-Hassan, Nevo, & Wade, 2015). Research has shown that half of the applicants are active in the social media, while more than a third of the employers utilize the available hiring process to contract different clients.

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According to Lee Hecht Harrison, from career transition and development firm, the rate of job seekers who are online is high. Hence, social networks are increasingly becoming the relevant source of information regarding available opportunities. Therefore, with time, many recruiting firms will become irrelevant. In a week, 19% of the job seekers log in their social network account three times a week, while, 22% are at least active thrice per month (Ali-Hassan, Nevo, & Wade, 2015). Only a small portion of the jobs seekers are not active in social media while searching for job opportunities.

On the other hand, personal information that is in one’s social media account is a true reflection of the personal character. It has been found that 37% of employers utilize social networks to evaluate job candidates (Acquisti & Fong, 2015). Therefore, about two out of five companies mainly screen personal social media profile to assess individual personality and traits. Moreover, companies have used applicant’s suitability in different positions. While this is happening, this has resulted to both negative and positive impacts on people. For instance, people who are dishonest can fake their character in their social media accounts (Acquisti & Fong, 2015). This is because social media is a vehicle of communication in the modern world of job recruitment.

Social media influence an individual’s career

Also, social media is believed to be one of the tools that affect an individual’s career. For instance, companies check the kind of pictures, tweets, and posts that an employee makes. One’s career can be compromised if the company access posts that are negative and bad pictures. For example, if one posts that their job sucks, I hate my boss, and I am looking for a job opportunity, he or she is likely is to get demoted and in other cases be fired. Therefore, social media can be used as a valuable tool to shape individual character and makes people post positive information regarding companies they are working for (Ali-Hassan, Nevo, & Wade, 2015).

Despite the fact that social media are important in the recruitment process, they cannot be fully reliable measures of individual’s character and attitude towards a certain job. Many people show a different picture, regarding their professional capabilities and personal lives. Therefore, employers should ensure that social media profiles do not undermine the process of securing best talents (Marsden & Gorman, 2001). In other cases, some job seekers even edit their profiles to impress potential employers. Therefore, employers should focus more on academic qualifications and experiences that people have. By doing this, the best and most qualified individuals for a specific job will be recruited (Marsden & Gorman, 2001).

In conclusion, it is clear that social media evaluation is being often used by the employers to scrutinize personal character. In the recruitment process, more than 35 % of the companies view job seekers social media profiles. It is done to find a correlation between social media personal account information with that of C.V and covering letter. Therefore, with time, social media will be an important tool to access and measure the level of qualification for job seekers on different posts.

Reference

Acquisti, A. and Fong, C.M., 2015. An experiment in hiring discrimination via online social networks.

Ali-Hassan, H., Nevo, D. and Wade, M., 2015. Linking dimensions of social media use to job performance: The role of social capital. The Journal of Strategic Information Systems, 24(2), pp.65-89.

Miller, G.S. and Skinner, D.J., 2015. The evolving disclosure landscape: How changes in technology, the media, and capital markets are affecting disclosure. Journal of Accounting Research, 53(2), pp.221-239.

Marsden, P.V. and Gorman, E.H., 2001. Social networks, job changes, and recruitment. In Sourcebook of labor markets (pp. 467-502). Springer US.