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The main question for a candidate: "Who are you on social media? And who are you in real life?"
• Why the candidate's social media networks are important for the recruiter
• Identifying the candidate's personal characteristics by his or her avatar
• Analyzing the candidate's photos and videos in addition to the resume
• Reading posts carefully — they represent a person's thoughts
• What can LinkedIn and Twitter accounts tell about a person
• Summary
Today, almost everyone is a regular user of social networking sites, and they may tell a lot about a person. Based on the social media accounts of an applicant, an experienced recruiter can compile a complete dossier on this person, having added the puzzle elements missing in the resume and not clarified during the online or offline interview.
Unfortunately, in social networks, the ideal “I” of a person, on which doesn’t always coincide with their real personality, is usually presented. Self-presentation, positioning and Photoshop work wonders, and a person becomes more attractive, more intelligent and more successful than in real life.
Nevertheless, one way or another, users show their everyday life, values and preferences making decisions each time on which photos or videos to publish and making up posts. In addition, according to their interests and preferences, they choose social media characters to follow or add to “friends”. All these online actions reveal users’ real personalities and demonstrate those around the person who is hiding behind the fabulous cover.
It’s possible to identify someone’s characteristics just by examining the avatar of the profile.
For instance, the recruiter should pay attention to the following details:
The content on someone’s pages also allows to make a lot of conclusions about the user.
An Instagram or Facebook account will provide loads of facts about its owner as well as an opportunity to follow the events happening in the account owner’s life.
Analyzing photos and videos, it is possible to reveal plenty of details. For example:
Texts created and posted by users let their readers know about the users’ interests, preferences, ways of thinking and making sentences, level of education, and literacy.
The recruiter should pay attention to the following moments:
Subscriptions and groups are also important because they provide the recruiter an opportunity to estimate the quality of the content the candidate tends to and to learn about the candidate’s real interests.
Besides especially popular social networking sites like Instagram and Facebook, there are also less popular ones like LinkedIn or Twitter. If the applicant has accounts there as well, it is useful to look at them, too.
LinkedIn allows to examine the applicant’s extra resume, read through his or her professional publications and look at the list of the people who the applicant follows. In addition, the reviews on the applicant’s pages have quite a big value as they let the recruiter see the opinions of the applicant’s former employers and colleagues or other professionals.
In addition to reviews, it may be useful to pay attention to the highlighted skills of the candidate and their available confirmations by other users. Such confirmations may be absent as LinkedIn pages are seldom actively added, but their presence may be a good advantage for the candidate.
Short posts and comments on the Twitter page of the applicant may let the recruiter identify what situations and info occasions the applicant is interested in, and how he or she expresses their opinion in the compact format. Plus, it is useful to see who the user retwits and who follows.
To sum up, it’s necessary to remember that social sites may tell a lot about a person’s personality and help to create a more or less correct opinion about this person. But the most reliable source of information about each potential employee is a face-to-face interview which can allow the recruiter to observe the behavior of the applicant, to hear his or her vocabulary and to estimate their way to express thoughts and react to the recruiter’s questions.
Therefore, the applicant’s pages on social sites should be used as an extra instrument in the work but not as the main one.
Our recruiters use 30 different channels: all traditional recruiting methods and recruiting with social media instruments.