The phenomenon of social networking sites such as Facebook and Bebo is having an unexpected spin-off benefit for businesses as potential sources of information when hiring staff.
CVs and other traditional background checks are now being supplemented with information gleaned from the candidate’s self-penned online journals. Where important positions are at stake, trawls of the web trails left by the Facebook generation can be important indicators of a candidate’s lifestyle and interests. And whether CV claims of spending most weekends sky-diving are in reality spent clubbing and going to the footie.
So far this type of recruitment practice has been confined to candidates seeking senior positions within large companies or organisations. Inevitably, though, this won’t always be the case, and soon small to micro-sized companies will be using the web to gain a fuller picture of the person they are about to hire.
Such is the power of social networking that recruitment and traditional press cuttings companies are offering online checking services. One such is Reputica, who bill themselves as an “online reputation tracking and reporting company”. Their chairman, Andrew Jordan explains: “Reputations are no longer made in traditional media. You can no longer rely on press cuttings to give you a whole picture of a person.”
To fill this knowledge gap companies like Reputica are turning to the web as a supplementary source of information for executive search firms. In Reputica’s case, they offer a summary of all data that exists on a candidate that resides in the public domain. This spans everything from data held by Companies House, to news reports and postings made in blogs, chatrooms, usenets, and trade journals.
The sales pitch used is that trawling the net in this way can produce a far deeper public perception of a candidate, particularly when they have to demonstrate a particular personal asset such as being eco-friendly, a business or thought leader, or having a high profile within a particular sector of business.
“Even if these senior managers have never written a blog, or posted a comment anywhere, someone else may have written about them or their company,” says Jordan. “The sheer strength and speed of our search process means that within minutes we can find information across a far broader spectrum of sources than has been possible previously. This report will give you an unbiased, complete view of exactly what has been said – and by who – about a particular candidate.”
Of course, hiring a company to do the legwork for you costs money. Small to micro-sized companies wishing to fill key posts could do much the same themselves for free, the information contained within a CV being sufficient to start conducting their own online search.
Things to be aware of are the need to ensure search results are:
· relevant and not relating to someone who happens to share the same name;
· useful and pertinent to the job under consideration;
· and not providing more information than you really need.
It should also be borne in mind that trawling through postings and social networking home pages may provide a better picture of what a candidate gets up to at the weekends rather than their ability to carry out the job in question. As with any recruitment tool, the final decision will be yours alone and based, as often as not, on personal experience and instinct.
Web trawls can only ever go so far in telling us what kind of person we have under consideration. In common with any internet search, we have to sort out the wheat from the chaff by determining what is relevant and what is personal minutiae of interest only to the candidate’s own circle of friends and family.
Likewise, bear in mind that information published online may not be reliable - and could in some cases have been posted maliciously. So, consider the source.
Meanwhile, underscoring just how rich a seam of information are social networking sites in the UK is a report from web watchers, comScore.
According to comScore, Britons are the most prolific users of social networking sites in Europe, with 78 per cent of the total UK online population – 24.9 million unique visitors - now belonging to the social networking community.
Usage of social networking sites in the UK is heavier than the European average in terms of hours spent, pages viewed, and the number of visits per month. The average visitor to social networking sites in the UK spent 5.8 hours per month on those sites in August and made 23.3 visits.
Light users made on average 4.6 visits per person while heavy users spent a substantial amount of time viewing social networking content in August, devoting 22 hours per person to their favourite social networking sites and making 71 visits.
To put the results in a European context, the Euro social networking community stood at 127.3 million unique visitors in August – reaching 56 per cent of the European online population.
