Margherita Nicolini and Edoardo Ferri – Liceo San Giuseppe Istituto De Merode
The way to find a job has radically changed over the past few years. Employers and employees alike have moved away from traditional print advertising to the Internet and its many forms of social media.But what exactly is a social media? It is an IT tool that permits the exchange of information between people and companies. This tool is playing an increasingly large role in the recruiting process. Recruiters check the social profiles of potential candidates prior to anything else. So this begs the question: Who gains the most from the use of social medias – the employer or the employee?
A new study from the Recruiter Nation Survey of 2015 provides information on how the recruitment of employees is changing.Social media has been adopted as a hiring tool worldwide, with 92 percent of recruiters surveyed using it as part of their process. 46 percent are using Linkedin, 29 percent are using Facebook, and 25 percent are using Twitter.
There is little doubt that recruiting employees, in using social media, benefit greatly in terms of usefulness. For one thing, it’s quick and easy. Some social networks use the SEO
algorithm (search engine optimisation) which allows the research for potential employees to be even faster. One of the main advantages of using social medias such as Linkedin is that there is a myriad of users and a wide range of choices on who to hire and who to contact.
Job candidates are searched for according to their location and found with a higher precision than through normal recruiting methods, thus narrowing the number of candidates and proving more effective.
Is it certain that available jobs can get filled quicker, lowering vacancy rates by virtue of social media’s high usage rate and immediate response time? Social media recruitment incurs a lower cost thanks to a high ROI (return on investment). Most social media users are fresh from college who have yet to accrue practical work experience.
Entrepreneurs have the opportunity to hire employees that are best suited for the job in question, which helps companies to attract young and undiscovered talents at the expense of their competitors. Many available job positions can be seen and read by a larger number of qualified candidates. As a result of a unique database for all the users, sometimes employees are requested by more than one company and they can pick and choose from the many jobs on offer.
Even though using social media is a great way to be recruited, the survey carried out by SHL indicates that less than 40 percent of graduates said they would use this method to find a job. 
One of the disadvantages of using social media as a recruitment method is that you need to be extremely careful in developing your profile. It is important to remember that you are competing with many other possible candidates for the job you’re applying to, which means that your profile needs to be impeccable. 
There are three main features that your profile should necessarily contain in order to catch an employer’s attention: keywords, connections and skills endorsements. Connections are probably the most essential of the three. 
Nonetheless, there are also some disadvantages. Many companies use the platform as a way to carry out propaganda and not as a form of employment.
According to the internet that there are some fundamental skills that an employee needs to posses in order to find a good job and that every employer looks for, such as:
1. Ability to work in a team structure
2. Ability to make decisions and solve problems
3. Ability to communicate verbally with people inside and outside an organisation
4. Ability to plan, organise and prioritise work
5. Ability to obtain and process information
6. Ability to analyse quantitative data
7. Technical knowledge related to the job
8. Proficiency with computer software programs
9. Ability to create and/or edit written reports
10. Ability to sell and influence others
To sum up, the platforms that are mainly used by employers and that this tools are more useful to them, but at the same time it allows the employee to make new contacts that could turn out to be useful in the work environment. We are seventeen years old, and we are happy that social media is evolving day by day and becoming more and more important. If now social media platforms are so used by employers and employees, let’s imagine how important they will become in a few years.
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