Using Social Media To Gain Applicant Insight

Finding employees with good character is paramount to building a solid team. Obviously, conducting a thorough interview will assist you in gaining perspective on the applicant’s character…..as well as a thorough background check and checking references.

But have you ever considered accessing social media to help you find employees with good character…..or avoid applicants that seem to be lacking good character?

Since I do not profess to be an expert in the field of social media, I am going to point out a few practices I have noticed the “pros” use to determine if they want to have a working relationship with certain people. You can use the same information to study the habits of your applicants and see what type of messages they send out to the digital world.

Once someone accepts you as a “friend” or a contact within various social media sites, you have the opportunity to access their personal and/or professional profile. Here you will find their education, marital status, children, city of residence, place of employment and previous employers, awards they received, business recommendations, etc. Can you imagine someone giving you such a vast amount of information face to face? It would take months, even years, for you to learn most of the information about someone that you can learn by reading the various profiles throughout various social media sites! Now, don’t get me wrong, you should never base employment solely on online profiles; however, you could certainly learn many interesting characteristics of an applicant via the social media networking sites. Imagine the value of finding that an applicant is a coach for a hometown soccer team. You can tap into his team building skills he must have to be a coach to help you train members of your business team.

Here are some examples I have found from viewing various member profiles:

1)  “Just reread Bob Burg’s book “The Go-Giver.” You might want to read it too!” S. Rooks

If you are familiar with Bob Burg’s “The Go-Giver” you understand that the book is about building relationships by putting the other guy first…..be it a colleague, competitor, customer, friend, or family member. By observing that Rooks is reading a book which is focused on “giving” rather than “taking” it gives me some sense of satisfaction, as an employer, that Rooks would find the philosophy of “giving” to be a valuable characteristic to have in her personal and/or business world. That’s a great team building characteristic.

2)  “Assistant Director for one of the largest regions in the largest world-wide networking organization.” B. Anderson

By reading Anderson’s profile on LinkedIn you find that she owns OrgTrack, a web development firm. But, the posting above also shows that she holds a position with a networking organization, BNI, which focuses on building your business through referrals. Having knowledge of this could help you realize that Anderson understands relationship marketing and that she has close business relationships with other business professionals throughout the world. It could prove to be a valuable asset to your business to employee someone that is connected with other businesses world-wide!

3) “Developed a training program for other Terminal Engineers—to improve safety, reliability, and productivity.” M. Chitwood

Chitwood is the franchise owner of BNI North Alabama, a referral-based marketing company, but her profile on one of the social media sites notes that she developed a training program for a major oil company. This information would give great insight on her abilities to help you build your team through developing team building and training programs.

As you can see with these three brief notations, information from social media sites can prove to be of great value when choosing people to add to your team.

Instant information, like it or not, is here to stay. Those of you who haven’t joined in yet, better double-time and play catch up because online information will only become more and more ever-changing. Special Consideration: My recommendation is to consume as much information as you can about each of your applicants and employees via the profile sections in the various social media sites. Imagine the value of finding that an applicant is a coach for a hometown soccer team. You can tap into their team building skills to help you train members of your business team.

Being a member of social media sites, gives you the opportunity to observe an applicants’ online personality. Interviews can be nerve-wrecking to certain personality type people. Using social media gives you the platform to have small talk with someone and possibly get to know the person on a completely different level. You learn about their family, their interests, even the sports team they pull for.

SueHenryTalks, Workshop & Training Diva,  is the most knowledgeable expert on social media that I have had the pleasure of working with. Sue has been a mentor of mine for several years and she’s a no-nonsense trainer who displays a controlled, yet fun learning environment. If you would like to learn social media etiquette and understand how to build your business through the use of social media, I highly recommend you contact Sue.