By Steven Duque

Social media are fundamentally changing the way we interact – not least of all, how people are found and hired for open jobs. But, let’s first explore what social media are more generally before delving deeper into their applications in recruiting and hiring.

A few basic functions characterize most, if not all, social media platforms. At their core, social media are: 

Telling and listening tools. Every online social media platform provides its users with a way to share content with others and see what others are sharing. Sharing can occur among individuals, between individuals and a group (1), or vice versa. Content-sharing is back-and forth, fast-moving (online attention spans are pretty short), and often in short form (tweets are only 140 characters).

• The upside: Publishing information is more democratic than it’s ever been. 
• The downside: A lot of people broadcast crap.

Contact databases and sets of communication systems. Think of social media experiences as using online address books with different ways to send and receive rich media content to and from your contacts. Some rightly say that certain platforms highlight particular types of social behavior; some platforms, like LinkedIn, are explicitly used for specific purposes. Increasingly, however, the distinctions between different types of contacts — personal versus professional, for instance — are blurring (2), especially on Facebook. Networks or groups formed within broader platforms like Facebook tend to focus on niche interests.

• The upside: We can interact with more people on a wider variety of topics in more ways than ever before.
• The downside: Online relationships and, hence, movements can be extremely shallow, leading to lower responsiveness to calls to action.

Branding and browsing platforms. Unlike traditional address books, social media platforms typically allow people to create much more robust listings of their personal information, in the form of user ‘profiles.’ Users are given opportunities to control how the online world sees them, first of all, by how they convey themselves via their profiles and, secondly, by their (often visible) online behavior. What we look and sound like in writing, pictures and video on both our profiles and online social behavior shapes others’ perceptions of our online brand.Our online brand is our identity – who we are – as perceived by the communities of individuals that populate social platforms and networks.

• The upside: We now have more channels to control how people perceive us both professionally and personally.
• The downside: Managing our social profiles and behavior well can be dauntingly time-consuming and difficult.  

As you can see, social media provide both tremendous opportunities and challenges for any business that hinges on relationships. Given their meteoric adoption rate (3), understanding and mastering participation on social platforms will be critical for success in 21^st century relationship-centered businesses. Recruiting and hiring are no exception.

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Footnotes:

1. …within ‘closed’ or ‘open’ networks within a given platform. A LinkedIn group is an example of a ‘closed network,’ and a Twitter conversation surrounding a particular hashtag (#) may be considered an example of an ‘open network.’
2. Facebook tends to be personal but is changing, LinkedIn is undeniably a professional network, and Twitter is the Wild West of content.
3. Facebook is currently at roughly 600m users, LinkedIn is at 90m users, and Twitter is at 190m users.