Social Media in Human Resources Management: Volume 12

It is widely established that many hiring managers view social networking websites (SNWs) such as LinkedIn and/or Facebook in the employment selection process, leading to the acceptance or rejection of job applicants. Due to the rapid evolution of social media, scientific study of SNWs has been substantially outpaced by organizational practice. This chapter focuses on a wide range of issues related to SNW screening relevant to research and practice.

The chapter: (1) reviews the current state of SNW screening practices, (2) describes a wide range of HR issues that should be considered such as privacy, discrimination, negligent hiring, validity, reliability, generalizability, impression management, applicant reactions, and utility, (3) draws connections to related issues already addressed by established employment selection methods to inform SNW screening, (4) discusses pros and cons of potential SNW screening approaches, and (5) provides a framework of best practices that should be incorporated into social network screening policies.

As an emerging employment selection approach, SNW screening demonstrates potential as a rich source of applicant information, but includes numerous legal and ethical issues. Further, these potential benefits and risks vary widely depending on the approaches used.

Provides HR practitioners with a wide range of information necessary to develop an effective social network screening policy, while making the case for academics to pursue research in this nascent area.

HR professionals have identified the power of information sharing for employer branding that could be obtained through the rapid growth of social media usage. The growing interest in and power of social media seem to be important for companies that want to make themselves known as interesting employers and to recruit prospective employees, using techniques that are more common to job seekers and recruiters. This study aims to explore the immediate future of employer branding through social media, as envisioned by academics and HR practitioners.

To look into the future of employer branding, we use the Delphi technique for forecasting, planning, issue identification, and framework development (Bobeva & Day, 2002). Two groups of respondents participated in this three-part study: 11 academics and 20 HR professionals. They were selected because of their research into the integration of HRM and IT from the e-HRM Global mailing list. The panelists participated in the research via electronic communication. The data were collected in three rounds from November 2010 to April 2011.

Research has revealed differences in the opinions of academics and HR professionals on the impact of social media on employer branding. The academics see its general effect as the targeting of audience for recruitment, marketing/company brand, and ways of communication/HR competencies. The practitioners see the image of the employer, visibility of the company, and organization responsiveness. The study presents other findings within the boundaries of employer branding value proposition, internal and external marketing, and the role of HR professionals. According to the academics, HR professionals in the future will need to possess knowledge about marketing and communication studies and web-based applications/develop new skills. They think that social media will impact the image of HR in organizations. On the other hand, HR professionals think that the future of their activities will depend on their awareness of recruitment trends, HR innovative thinking, and HR networking skills. Although the object of their activity will remain recruitment, HR professionals will have to be continuously updated on what is new in the social media in terms of recruitment.

This study presents the results of the Delphi technique, which is itself considered an original research method and not widely accepted in the tough “publish or perish” world. The value of the research is its forecast about the future developments of employer branding through social media, as envisioned by academics and HR practitioners.

The aim of this chapter is to explore employee behaviors and expectations of the role of social media when searching for jobs, to offer recruiters and companies valuable insights to design and manage appropriate web-based employer branding and recruitment strategies.

The research strategy is based on semi-structured in-depth interviews involving 34 central informants: talented Gen Yers and social media recruitment experts and mangers. The project focuses on the Italian context, an exemplary country with the highest social media penetration rate.

The results demonstrate the “bounded” popularity of social media as a recruitment tool among Gen Yers who implement up to five active and passive behaviors, albeit not all widespread, according to varying patterns and using different social media for different purposes: receiving, seeking, sharing, leading, and experiencing. Gen Yers, with aims that vary in line with various staffing phases, collect and share rumors and voices from both internal and controlled organizational sources but also, and above all, from external and organizational sources that companies do not control directly.

Social media seem to offer appealing and valuable opportunities to attract and engage talented young individuals, sustaining the quality, quantity, and fairness of employment relationships. Conversely, they also involve some organizational risks and costs. The chapter offers some managerial cautions and advocates a radical change in the prevalent HRM mindset for the improved management of transparency that social media solutions entail.

Results contribute in understanding how social media can better sustain employer branding and recruitment activities, especially considering the needs and expectations of talented young employees and professionals in the Italian context. Italy is an emblematic context, where the social media potential appears to be extremely interesting, considering its high rate of social media penetration.

The chapter presents a senior management view on the role of new and technologically advanced tools, such as social media in internal communications.

We conducted 23 in-depth interviews with senior managers of large- and medium-sized companies in Slovenia.

The results obtained in the research confirmed that the senior management possess a strong awareness of the importance of internal communications in managing their organizations. Moreover, many top managers even pointed out that internal communications play a crucial role, and add value to the business performance through more motivated employees and that social media in the context of internal communications are vivid and growing in importance.

The study provides a starting point for further research in this area. However, the core policy recommendation would mainly be focused on internal communication experts, who must no longer underestimate the urgency of developing communication programs that help employees and senior management start working with social media successfully.

The research presents a new — senior management view on the role of social media in internal communications.

The development of social media provides new opportunities for recruitment and raises various questions. This chapter aims to clarify areas of agreement and disagreement regarding the integration of social media in recruitment strategies.

A Delphi study was conducted among a panel of 34 French experts composed of 26 practitioners and 8 academics.

Three quantitative results and five qualitative results are presented. Social media appear as an opportunity to raise the strategic role of HR professionals through employer branding strategy, internal skills development, and a greater involvement of managers within the sourcing process.

This study points out several barriers and limits regarding the integration of social media in recruitment strategies and encourage HR professionals to take up the challenge. Multiple recommendations are addressed to HR professionals.

This chapter is based on an innovative application of the Delphi method. Moreover, it offers a more comprehensive and critical look on the integration of social media in recruitment strategies.

This chapter examines the use of social media within organizations in order to engage with both current and potential future employees.

It is commonly claimed that social media technologies can help organizations to engage with both current and potential employees. This chapter examines these claims through an examination of the use of social media within two organizations: a UK television company and an international UK telecommunications company. Data was gathered from the company websites and via 34 semi-structured interviews.

The two case studies confirm that social media has promise with regard to facilitating the engagement of existing employees. However, the findings suggest also that the use of social media to engage employees will not be successful unless the culture and leadership of the organization already embraces open communication and participation.

The findings are limited in that they rely on two case studies and therefore might not be applicable to other organizations. Despite the limitations, this chapter has significant implications for organizations considering the adoption of social media as a means to improve employee engagement. It suggests that when adopting social media for organizations, the very first step should be to assess the organizational readiness with a focus on culture and people rather than on the technology itself. This is because managerial behaviors and styles are central to the level of engagement individuals feel with an organization. For the same reason leaders need to be trained to lead collaboratively, and to be able to understand the new social practices.

The chapter makes an important contribution to an extremely sparse literature on social media as a means for engaging with employees through the provision of rare empirical data and is therefore valuable both for managers and for HR scholars and practitioners.

This chapter examines the affordances of social media to understand how groups are experienced through social media. Specifically, the chapter presents a theoretical model to understand how affordances of social media promote or suppress entitativity.

Participants (N=265) were recruited through snowball sampling to answer questions about their recent Facebook status updates. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was used to examine the goodness of fit for our model.

We validate a model of entitativity as it occurs through the affordances offered by social media. Participant’s knowledge that status update responders were an interacting group outside of Facebook affected their perceptions of interactivity in the responses. Interactivity and history of interactions were the strongest predictors of status update entitativity. Further, status update entitativity had positive relationships with overall Facebook entitativity as well as group identity.

To encourage group identity through social media, managers need to increase employees’ perceptions of entitativity, primarily by enabling employees to see the interactions of others and to contribute content in social media platforms.

This is the only study we know of that empirically examines how groups are experienced through social media. Additionally, we draw from an affordance perspective, which helps to generalize our findings beyond the site of our study.

This study aims to investigate the extent to which Generation Y job seekers use social media to enhance their job search experience.

The chapter draws on an in-depth analysis of qualitative data gathered from 29 interviews with recent university graduates in Human Resource Management (HRM).

The findings of this study challenge popular stereotypes and anecdotes which seem to suggest that the power of technology come naturally and easily to Generation Y users (The Economist, 2010). It also suggests that young people, particularly graduates are unprepared for the job market. Many of them are stuck in the traditional ways of looking for a job despite the information that is available for them to exploit modern technologies to enhance their job search experience.

Colleges and universities should include modern job search techniques such as social media into their curricula. In addition, career centers and employers need to play their part in disseminating information about how social media can be used by graduates to search for jobs.

The study emphasizes the need for individual users to exploit technology such as social media to enhance their professional and career success.

The chapter explores if and how online and face-to-face organizational environments can interact, and if and how this interaction could foster managerial practices to sustain personal growth, organizational development, and employee–organization relationships.

Research project is based on an emblematic case study: Fubles.com is a social sport sharing platform with one of the most active sport communities in Europe. This case is representative of a novel initiative, useful in understanding how social media drive organizational results.

Social media activities do not always substitute face-to-face relationships; online connections can enhance relationships, in terms of quantity, quality, and fairness, generating comprehensive reconfiguration of people practices, before and after the game. Thanks to social networks, organizations can support interpersonal contacts, enabling people to organize collective activities both virtually and physically.

The case advocates three levels of possible organizational reconfigurations through social media (individual, collective, and organizational) that can foster the quality of the employee–organization relationship.

Results suggest that social media are sources of new and innovative ways to interact within and across organizations, reinforcing not only the online interactions, but especially traditional face-to-face connections through a process of reconfiguration of people practices.

In this chapter we discuss the implications social media have for the self-representation and identity formulation of professionals within organizations. Under the assumption that new, technology-mediated networking possibilities call for a reformulation of the boundaries between the professional and the private, we propose several avenues of investigation. The concept of “online personae” is also introduced in order to describe how managers may strive for equilibrium while balancing on and offline identities with impression management efforts.

Proceeding conceptually, we review the existing literature and practice of managerial social media use and delineate the challenges, or “tensions” professionals have to mitigate while expressing themselves online. This allows for a full exploration of digital interaction as a quest for equilibrium, between one’s professional and personal self-expression, but also between the management of one’s impression, and the emotional attachment to a social media profile.

We argue that social media may challenge current conceptions of managerial identity and work practices to a degree. Social media may demand different forms of representation both to inside and outside audiences, which can lead to the mediatization of both the professional and the organization, and call for a more conscious formulation of identity and management of impressions. We argue in particular that, within this context, online personae may serve as entities (through single or multiple accounts) delineating boundaries between the various roles managers are asked to perform within their professional and personal lives.

Managerial awareness toward a tool such as online personae may help in critically reflecting the embeddedness of managerial practice within social networks. A critical management of personae can also help in formulating identity-based strategies for gaining access and improving the quality of connections and interactions. Ultimately, as social media become a tool for workplace collaboration, the strategic thinking behind online personae might take a progressively larger importance for the success of individuals, and for organizations at large.

The chapter introduces a managerial point-of-view to the field of digital identities, widely analyzed on samples of adolescents and young adults. This allows to investigate matters proper of a professional life, such as the management of work/life boundaries, which become increasingly blurry in the online world. The chapter also introduces the concept of “online personae,” which aims at describing with more specificities the message and audience consequences behind the choice of one single social media profile, or several coexisting ones.

The purpose of this research is to develop a Social Information System research model that uses the core constructs intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation, and amotivation to explain social networking adoption among tweens, teens and young adults.

In developing the research model, we triangulated theories to examine the different orientations of motivation. The data collection process included a stratified sample size of 270 respondents. Following data collection we analyzed the results using structural equation modeling in the Partial Least Square software package.

The constructs amotivation, intrinsic and extrinsic motivations were all statistically significant in explaining continuance intention to use social networking services (SNS).

Researchers and practitioners have intimated that although there has been a rise in the number of persons accessing and becoming members of SNS, several subscribers who join subsequently leave after a minimal period. The practical implication of this study lies in providing a preliminary understanding of what determines or inhibits continuance intention of SNS membership.

Despite efforts, research in IS and technology acceptance literature regarding SNS diffusion is limited in scope. The theoretical implication of this study lies in the model that has been developed and validated to provide a more effective tool for the scholarly evaluation of SNS adoption. Existing adoption models are insufficient to explain voluntary technology usage of this nature.

The purpose of this study is to investigate how social media features enable crowdsourcing and to gain rich understanding of mechanisms that lead from online community design practices to success in crowdsourcing initiatives.

Inductive qualitative methods were used for investigating the case of crowdsourcing-based microstock business model. Twenty-three in-depth interviews with stock photography industry insiders were combined with netnography data and documents.

Two mechanisms influencing participants’ motivation and peer-to-peer learning were identified. Both extrinsic and intrinsic motivations are important for participants’ engagement.

Findings of this inductive effort should be replicated in other industry settings and used to develop testable propositions of antecedents and outcomes of crowdsourcing implementations.

Companies embarking on crowdsourcing initiatives can enhance participants’ motivations through social media and enable learning through online communities. Managers must understand who participates in the crowd and what their motivation is.

This study is investigating under-researched peer-vetted creative production crowdsourcing model. Managers can use presented ideas for developing crowdsourcing online communities.