Social Networking Sites and Graduate Recruitment: Sharing Online Activities?(SoMWP1002)

The increasing impact of social networking sites in communication and socializing worldwide brings attention to how they affect recruitment processes of graduates in organizations. Many employers are now searching for graduates’ data to complement their assessment of job candidates and hiring decisions. While this still is not developed as a common practice by (HR) practitioners and recruiters, existing research remains underdeveloped from the perspective of graduates’ use of such sites. In this paper we analyse key impacts of cyber personal data of social networking sites for students and graduates’ job opportunities. We use a combination of activity theory and interpretive analysis of data we obtain from graduates participation in several popular social networking sites, which enables us to ascertain more clearly the role that sites could play in recruitment. Findings from graduates’ experiences indicate that such sites have been used by a large proportion of them and with a variety of purposes. Graduates use these sites to post their cyber personal data to reflect their daily lives, with no little or no regard for the content and its potential effects on employers. This leads us to suggest the importance for graduates to project an adequate perspective of their daily activity to potential employers on social networking sites and for further clarification on how they can become a common reference for both employers and graduates