Can the Use of Social Media be Useful in Universities' Career Services?: An Overview of Five European Countries

Can the Use of Social Media be Useful in Universities' Career Services?: An Overview of Five European Countries

Ginevra Gravili
Copyright: © 2017 |Pages: 14
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-5225-0559-4.ch013
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Abstract

Social media tools are becoming an important presence in recruitment processes, transforming them. They allow an instant sharing of ideas, opinions, knowledge and experiences, creating a new “space-time” dimension that could be translated in a new way (additional) to “recruit” workers. Although there are many benefits and promises from social media, however several risks are associated with their use. The ambiguity related to legal and ethical issues of social media, at the same time, contains the enthusiasm related to the potentialities that social media offer. In particular, this chapter aims at analysing the perceived risks and benefits of social media by students to understand if it can be useful for University Career Services (referred to UCS) to use these tools in job placement. The analysis is conducted in five countries: Netherlands, Sweden, Lithuania, Bulgaria and Croatia. It can be useful for managers of universities and firms to understand whether the presence of Universities on social media by students and firms is positive or not.
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Background

The Job placement service in athenaeums aim at facilitating contacts between graduates and working world. Today, working world is changing. New lifestyles, values, language, and behaviour require universities investments in new efficient communication processes. In this scenario, the HRM are progressively changing their recruitment processes abandoning more and more the traditional forms in favour of new processes, such as social recruitment, that guarantee a quality workers profile that measure up to the challenges dictated by globalization and technology. Recruitment “has been, substantially, influenced by social media” (Schramm, 2007, Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010), which allow companies to look for not only the “active candidates” (Furness, 2008; Doherty 2010) but also “passive candidates” (Williams and Verhoeven, 2008; Jackson, 2010), through the construction of a relationship based on mutual interest and understanding (Davison, Maraist and Bing, 2011). The use of social media also allows potential candidates to get to know the brand of the company (Schramm 2007; Dickson and Hollet, 2010), which can show “the human aspect of society” and “an idea about daily activities” (Richards, 2007, Madia, 2010). In this way the job seeker can choose an appropriate employer (Peluchette and Karl, 2010).

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