Question

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.

Answer 1

Advantages are:

Immediate response – Social media posts get an immediate response, particularly because of their 'share' feature. Sharing the posts increases the posts' reach and is readable by a wide number of viewers. When it is read by a large population, the probability of immediate reaction increases and time is saved.
Lower costs – When you have complete knowledge of how to use it, recruiting via social media platforms costs much less than any other channel. Posting in a facebook group or facebook page costs nothing, and thus saves the company a lot of resources compared to the advertising costs with agencies, job boards and referrals.

Fresh talent – Channels of social media are mostly used by the society's youth segment , especially college graduates. From a pool of fresh talents, who have innovative ideas and skills, the company gets a chance to choose.
Greater scope – A huge number of people are using social media all over the world. Hence, a broad population reads all that gets written on them. If a work vacancy is posted using the right technique on a social media site, it gets reached by a lot of people and therefore the recruiter gets the advantage of selecting from a wide pool of applicants.

Disadvantages are:

Effective broadcasting of jobs on twitter is not easy. Twitter prevents you from using more than 140 words; thus you can not be able to show effectively what you want. This does not contain any crucial information and it may entice the candidates.
Facebook was used as a main source to speak to friends and family and to connect. Many people may not want to indulge in professional activities such as recruiting on Facebook. We may also not want to add their employers as friends to their Facebook profiles. Discovered candidates may not all be genuine and the 'privacy settings' make it hard to select the correct candidate.

While effective in recruitment, LinkedIn consumes a lot of initiation time when users need to build relationships and networks to spread their word to a large number of people. Additionally, LinkedIn restrains users from using more contact addresses than the cap. This hampers contact. Employers are therefore unable to send messages to people who are not connected to them. One more drawback is that LinkedIn has not yet entered the stage where foreign recruitment can be used internationally.