Social Networking in Recruitment: Build your social networking expertise to give yourself a cost-effective advantage in the hiring market with this book and ebook.

Recruitment is a high-stakes game: hire the wrong person and you do untold damage to your team's performance, act unfairly during the process and you will be breaking laws, lose a candidate at the last stage and you may be introducing costly delays as well as writing off the time and energy that has been invested in the hiring process.

We know the general risks of recruitment, whether the process be conducted through job boards or through more modern means. There are also general risks inherent in using social networks as a means of communication and engaging with people outside your company: reputational risks, legal and legislative risks, confidentiality and privacy risks, all of which apply to the recruitment process. Then, there are the unique risks that depend on the type of business: for example, a finance business operating under their country's prudential oversight would face different risks to a health research organization with competitive and ethical...

Unlike those monsters under children's beds, there are very real and very frightening issues for employees and organizations interacting through social media. Let's line up some of the ugly and scary issues that have arisen in recent times:

I encourage you to take a fresh look at your company's social media policy: does it clearly specify the rules and guidelines for your staff, does it align with your company values, is it brief and written in simple language...

Large companies can be a labyrinth of departments, managers, and experts, and it can be easy for employees to get lost, especially for HR advisors engaging with candidates through social media when there is no single point of responsibility for social media interactions. This is a challenge if one of your organization's risks is realized.

Let's consider an HR advisor who is responsible for maintaining the Facebook page for recruitment at an insurance firm: when a customer uses the recruitment page to complain about their insurance claim, how should they respond? What happens if it takes a couple of days to find the right person to provide an appropriate response? How about the HR advisor responsible for managing the Twitter feed from the careers team at a consultancy firm: when a candidate complains the recruitment process is unfair, what should their response be? What damage can be done if this isn't responded to quickly?

Creating some ready responses for your team empowers...

There are serious landmines in your path as you navigate through the online world to execute a professional recruitment strategy. This is a new world with the rules of engagement still being written. This means that the HR department needs to be able to identify and understand the risks so that they can be mitigated and managed. The nature of social networks is one of immediacy and speed, so in order to manage risks in this world, your team needs to be able to act quickly and effectively. In this chapter we've worked through the steps to identify and understand the general risks of recruitment in an online world, as well as the unique and specific risks that apply to your industry and operating environment. This then forms the basis for a social media policy that provides guidance for all your employees on company expectations of their behavior while online and when representing the organization. We've also used this understanding of risks to create support for your team members...