As a HR practitioner, I do get questions about:

• What do you think about using Social Network to Recruit?
• Is it a norm for HR to check on employees behaviour via Social Network?
• Is it ethical for HR to be spying on employees (or potential employees) using Social Network?

Before I give my answers to these questions, let me be clear that they are all my personal opinion and does not represent the view of my organization.  By the way, my organization blocks all Social Networking sites from the office - So I guess the answer on their view is quite straight-forward.

What Do I think about using Social Network to Recruit?

I seriously think that it’s a fantastic thing to do and that social network has lots of potential in them.  For those who do not agree, here’s my challenge - “Is it wrong to recruit a good potential you found while attending some networking events?”.  Let me just say that both are the same, just different platform.  If you think your organization doesn’t, think again; the headhunter services that you do might be using social networking to recruit too!

Recruiting on Social Networking can further be broken down to several ways:

• One to one targetting (this is mostly done in Linked-in where you can find the profile of potentials).
• Mass advertising on your own profile which may attract some attention.
• Targetted advertising (Facebook has this feature that you could advertise just to a targetted group).  They stop short of selling your information.
• Join group discussions and you may find some very good strategic thinker in there (which is just like meeting someone in networking events)!

Is it a norm for HR to check on employees behaviour via Social Network?

No, I don’t think it’s a norm; or at least not yet in Malaysia.  But if the question was whether I think is a good platform to check on employees behaviour?  I think the answer would be “Yes”!  However, what’s more important here is the intention of checking.  HR should not be playing the role of “policeman” trying to catch “bad employees”.  Rather, I’ve always encourage organizations to get on social networking (Ie: to start a facebook/linkedin site for employees) for the purpose of gathering employees sentiments.

Organizations spend hundreds of thousands organizing employee engagement surveys, communication townhalls with Q&A session with the intention of understanding employees.  Asian being asian, the “other comments” in the engagement survey are often left empty because we just do not like writing as much.  In addition, the non-confrontational style of Asian employees means nothing controversial is likely to be asked using townhall session.  So would we really know the true sentiments of employees here?  I don’t think so.  On facebook however, employees may be enjoying themselves and sometimes venting their frustration which may even be screaming about how horrible the organization is.  That gives the organization an opportunity to sense the truth and look into what else could be done for the employees.  The subconcious venting of frustrations about the organization could be used as valued feedback for companies to continously improve.  So why not leverage on something that’s free?

Is it ethical for HR to be spying on employees (or potential employees) using Social Network?

Spying on employees - If there really some serious IR issues or legal matters to be resolved, it could be used as one of the last resort alternatives.  Otherwise, I feel any “spying” effort will only create lost in trust amongst employees.  So the answer would be NO.

Spying on potential employees - The straight-forward answer will still be NO.  However, it’s “officially NO”, not “strict NO”.  It’s all up to the hiring manager and not HR.  The hiring manager should feel free to search the person up on the Internet if he/she wants to.  Afterall, didn’t most organizations preach about “becoming friends with your employees”?  Before you meet-up with a friend on a blind-date, wouldn’t you be curious enough to search that person up the Internet?  That being said, hiring managers should be objective enough to understand that anything happening in private life that does not affect work should not affect hiring decisions.  It could however be able to tell sometimes whether a candidate is lying or exagerating during an interview.

My final word of advise - Manage your image on cyberspace the same way you manage it in real-life and you’ll be fine.

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Tags: employee reference, facebook, linkedin, online reputation, recruitment, reference check, social network

This entry was posted by Clayton J.C Tan on Tuesday, July 6th, 2010 at 5:50 pm and is filed under Business Strategies, Human Resources, Leadership & Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.