Week 5 EOC - Social Networks and Job Hunting

In the past few years job marketing itself has greatly changed thanks to social media sites. Companies now use a combination of recruiting techniques to not only find new employees, but people to help promote and market their brand for them in the form of brand ambassadors. “Marketers select their brand ambassadors very carefully, based on customers’ devotion to a brand and the size of their social circles. They sometimes search blogs and online social networks to identify individuals who are already functioning as brand advocates. Once selected, the ambassadors are trained with real brand knowledge to go along with their passion for the brand. The ambassadors then tap into friends, family, groups, and broader audiences through personal conversations, blogs, live events, and online social media.” (Armstrong, Gary, and Philip Kotler. Marketing: An Introduction, 10th Edition. Pearson Learning Solutions, 2010. VitalBook file.) Another location they find brand ambassadors in is “[m]arketing agency RepNation identifies and manages college student ambassadors for companies as diverse as JetBlue, Microsoft, and Macy’s.”(Armstrong, Gary, and Philip Kotler. Marketing: An Introduction, 10th Edition. Pearson Learning Solutions, 2010. VitalBook file.) The employee recruitment changes have gone from the more well-known sources as Linkedin and other famous job recruitment websites to being more in favor to Facebook recruitment. “Facebook's use as a job-recruitment tool remains small, but its appeal may be growing. Some recruiters say they have all but eliminated their spending on job boards, which can charge a few hundred dollars per job posting, depending on volume. Others note that while LinkedIn contains a more comprehensive résumé database, candidates tend to value referrals from their connections on Facebook more.” (Wall Street Journal, Recruiters Troll Facebook for Candidates They Like, Joe Light, 8/8/2011) I don’t know how accurate the article itself is, nor have I ever personally seen a company recruit people through Facebook for hiring services. As a previous manager I personally wouldn’t look for Facebook to be a hiring reference, nor would I expect someone to let me impose on their personal privacy in order to hire them. I believe in keeping work and personal life separate as do most other companies to some extent and therefore I believe that there needs to be separate places for finding professional experiences in comparison to the personal feelings and random things that are on most peoples’ Facebook accounts which do not show their professional capability in any way, shape, or form.