Electronic Media: An Emergent Personality Mining Tool for Attracting and Screening

Introduction

The word e-recruitment, online recruitment or internet recruitment, indicate the formal sourcing of job applicants through an online platform. The roots of this emergent practice goes back in the mid 1980’s, when the word first appeared to be in the articles published back then (Gentner, 1984; Casper, 1985), though an organized description to the terminology became almost a decade later in various HR journals, in the mid-1990s, when IT companies and universities began to use the Internet extensively.

Since the arrival of social networking, the recruiters after looking at the process suspiciously have now started to transform the ways in which they attract and communicate with the best candidates. Today’s most successful recruiters are now constantly online and, on the move, to keep pace with the technology. Organizations are now accepting social networking with open arms as a way to attract and retain employees. This has made a lot of organisations to make themselves visible to the candidates on social networking sites like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook, so as to engage the candidates and give them the opportunity to interact with them on a more informal basis. According to a report at the end of 2009 from Gartner, for any organisation, recruitment is an ideal way to start via social media usage in HR due to its time and cost efficiency (Otter, 2009).

The use of social networking sites (SNWs) is no longer an advanced technology but the access to qualified employees that will form the unique advantages for a company. A report suggested that SNWs are among the most visited sites on the internet, just behind the major search engines (Ronn, 2007). To find a right candidate for the right position is one of the biggest challenges prevailing in organisations since long. With traditional tools like emails, most of the time gets utilised in administrative or routine tasks but with the help of social networking sites for personality mining the processes can be handled electronically 24*7 as the use of such networking sites allows the candidates to present their professional details in the most dynamic manner than the traditional resume format.