Do you think that the organizations have to wait for sometime before judging the real worth of social media? Social networking is helping recruiters to find the best people from the market. So do you suggest on replacing social networking to other recruitment tools which are been used in the industry?

Social networking these days is considered to be one of the most sought out solution for sourcing and recruiting employees in an organization by recruiters. However, the potential that lies in social networking still needs to be tapped to a greater extent.

Many recruiters have benefited a lot by using social media and networking to hire people for an organization. However, will it be successful for everyone, needs to be debated and discussed. Organizations still wants to gain confidence before moving from old conventional tools to consider social media approach as one of the best available remedies in the market today.

What are the thoughts that go in people's mind when they are online and on social networking sites? We need to study how this behavior affects the online networking platform.

What does the recruiter or hiring person thinks:

The hiring consultant is confident that as soon as he joins any social media site he is definitely going to get an access to an immense pool of talented professionals. On the various communities or specific networking groups he is confident to find people related to his industry or market. To check whether this statement is true we have to analyze what people want or think when they interact with one another on the social arena.

Psychology of the People joining Social Media sites:

People look forward to stay in touch and connect with their friends. Most of the people interact through various social mediums to build strong and long term connections with their offline friends. They also look forward in gaining value by sharing information and their networks with others. Most of the individuals talk about their personal lives and very few indulge in career related activities or sharing their future aspirations with others. There are various dedicated sites on developing great career prospects however for our current discussion, I would like to keep them out of it.

The usage behavior here suggests us that:

Individual's network size is quite small in comparison to their overall connection strength.

Men respond to an average of seven postings where as women to ten. At one time men often email or chat with not more than 4 while women can interact with six. An account holder's 'friends' are seldom from the same profession or background. Most account holders are protective about friends in their core group. Since the basic purpose of joining social networks is to keep in touch with offline friends and acquaintances, information shared or exchanged is personal. Account holder profiles too seldom mention professional details and even if they do, those details are not enough to assess an individual's professional competence or caliber. We are also unable to judge his performance or knowledge in that particular field.

The observation above forces us to rethink on the benefits of social networking in the professional arena. However what can be concluded from here is that we are going to face lot of challenges in using it as a complete recruiting tool.

How much successful is Social Media?

Discussions around career development or honing one's skills are seldom found in the various chat rooms or scraps. As a recruiter one would be able to extract very limited information on an individual's candidature which most of the times leads to incorrect decision making. The profile of many individuals seems to hide the useful information and often carries plane garbage. This leads to a lot of confusions and many times resulting in delays and unjustifiable decisions.

How Do You Verify Online Details Of Candidates?

Are you confident that the information sorted out via social media for any candidate will be 100% true? No obviously as there is no supporting documents or proofs attached. In this kind of a scenario my advice will be not to heavily rely on social media tool for your hiring needs.

In order to make social media strategy work for our benefit, correct and real information needs to be floated online. Till the time this gap is there our relying on this medium is highly under a question mark.