Technology and Social Media's Impact on Recruitment - Essay Example

How will technology and social media influence or change recruitment and talent management in the future? Human knowledge is growing at a pace fasterthan ever before. The knowledge of graduates gets outdates with the passage of time as human knowledge, on average, doubles with the passage of every two years (Oracle, 2012, p. 13). Workforce in the future will need technical skills for different work categories and job levels. Technological changes affect the traditional blue collar jobs. Technology has brought a revolutionary change in the style of work. Changes brought about by technology range from subtle too very dramatic. Some of the technological trends that have a great impact on the talent management include digitization, increased expectations, and telecommunications. Social media has become a viable way of quick interaction between the recruiters and the candidates. The quality of staff members and their services in the hotel industry has a direct impact on the bottom line. Employees serve as the frontline brand ambassadors and their performance drives the true competitive advantage of the organization. To succeed, the employers need to recruit enthusiastic, accountable, and competent employees that should be kept motivated and engaged. To achieve this, many innovative firms are seeing the potential of improving the recruiting strategies with social media (Headworth, n.d.). The rapid advancement of technology and growth of the use of social media will bring drastic changes in the practices of recruitment and talent management in the hotel industry in the future. Historically, rates of employee turnover within the hotel industry have been remarkably high; turnover rates have been touching 50 per cent. “The American Hotel and Lodging Association has estimated that the turnover cost per employee is a minimum of $4100 per employee, and the American Management Association pegs this number at 30% of an employee’s annual salary” (Cobb, 2013). The high rate of employee turnover in the hotel industry can be partly attributed to lack of opportunities of training and development and inappropriate talent management that has led the employees to attrition and dissatisfaction. To combat the retention issues, hospitality organizations are in need of professional, motivated, committed, and developed graduates that would help them attain their immediate and long-term goals (Scott and Revis, 2008). The trends are expected to change for the better in the future. The continued growth of social media and technology has made room for the working of more team activities and knowledge work remotely. Retention in the hotel industry will be improved by allowing top talent to operate remotely. It will also ease the recruitment efforts, though the hospitality industry’s nature might limit the option of working remotely to only a few corporate positions and roles. Growth in the use of social media will have major implications for talent management in the future. Generations that have been raised in this culture expect great extent of control, self-efficacy, and autonomy. These employees cannot be expected to blindly follow the direction as automations in roles that are highly structured and do not provide much room for creativity or self-direction. Likewise, if these employees are asked to work with the technology of subpar enterprise but are not provided with access to the powerful external tools, it will cause serious disengagement even if organizations having this culture have enough employees to survive (Oracle, 2012, p. 18). The core influences of such factors as demographics, economics, and technology will create ““rogue wave” events in which the total isn’t just greater than sum of the parts, it is orders of magnitude greater” (Oracle, 2012, p. 19). The traditional resume will become secondary to the results produced by search engines in importance. “[W]e will all have to accept that a one-page summary of our professional histories, expertise, skills, and achievements – that which we think of as a “resume” – will no longer act as our differentiation in the job market” (Meister, 2013). The depth and breadth of the personal brand of an individual would be of greater value to the employers. The recruiting manager will engage in one or more of these activities; check out the top searches on the name of the candidate on Google, observe the number of followers and their professional statuses on the candidate’s profiles on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, and size of the candidates’ LinkedIn community, their Klout score, and the recommendations they have on LinkedIn before calling the candidate for an interview. “A Klout score is a statistical score from 1-100 which ranks you on variables such as: how many people you reach through social media; how much they trust you; and on what topics” (Meister, 2013). Job advertisements will contain the requirement of having a Klout score above a certain minimal level. Internet will serve as the most fundamental platform of recruitment in the hotel industry in the future. To a considerable extent, the change has already started to take place; “The golden standard—job wanted ads in the paper—have essentially been replaced by big internet job boards (like Monster and CareerBuilder) as well as local and niche industry job boards” (Teichberg, 2012). Both recruiters and candidates commonly refer to the ads posted on the Internet for the job opportunities. Many candidates even advertise themselves on such websites as Craigslist where the interested employers review their curriculum vitae. Likewise, for talent management, numerous software programs are already being used in the hospitality sector. One such software is Halogen Talent Management Suite that helps develop a culture of ongoing development, high performance, and commitment of services of high quality (Halogen Software, n.d.). Recruitment in the hotel industry will be influenced by the practice of gaming in the future. Gamy technology will allow the employers to offer previews and video tours of job that are realistic and thus grab the attention of the candidates. Gaming technology draws the candidates to the website of the organization and makes them stay there longer while they play some games. Users find it an interesting way to learn about the organization. Gamers are inculcating this awareness in the recruiters that awarding badges and progressing toward a goal grabs the attention of people that have been online game players for many years. This technique is already in practice in a lot of hotels around the world. For example, the My Marriott game is played on Facebook in as many as 122 countries around the world (Gorman, 2011, p. 11). This was the first game that was designed to make the players educated regarding careers in the hotel industry. In this game, the players enter into a virtual kitchen of Marriott where they recruit the employees and train them, thus ensuring that the meals are well prepared, guests are served well, and the ingredients and restaurant equipment is purchased on a budget. Points are earned when the customers are satisfied and are lost when they are not. Technology and social media are the major socioeconomic drivers that will open ways for many opportunities as well as challenges. Talent professionals in the hotel will form a nuanced perception of the evolving trends in terms of their impact on organizations industry in the future. Technology and social media will be the major drivers of recruitment and talent management in the hotel industry in the future. The impact of changing economic evolution, demographics, and advancement in technology on talent management will be profound. These factors, in effect, may be mutually reinforcing thus causing even larger effects to happen. Organizations considering talent as the main differentiator need to consider these trends’ impacts on their strategies and processes of talent. References: Cobb, A. (2013). Talent Management Practices with Impact. Hotel Business Review. Retrieved from http://hotelexecutive.com/business_review/2525/talent-management-practices-with-impact. Gorman, S. (2011). The Recruiting Revolution: How Technology Is Transforming Talent Acquisition. Retrieved from http://onlinemba.unc.edu/wp-content/uploads/Talent-Acquisition.pdf. Halogen Software. (n.d.). Talent management that serves up employee engagement and service quality. Retrieved from http://www.halogensoftware.com/products/hospitality/. Headworth, A. (n.d.). Smart Social Media Recruitment Strategies. Ark Group. Meister, J. (2013). 2013: The Year of Social HR. Retrieved from http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeannemeister/2013/01/03/2013-the-year-of-social-hr/. Oracle. (2012, June). The Future of Talent Management: Underlying Drivers of Change. Retrieved from http://www.oracle.com/us/media1/future-talent-mgmt-change-drivers-1676642.pdf. Scott, B., and Revis, S. (2008). Talent management in hospitality: graduate career success and strategies. International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management. 20(7), 781 – 791. Teichberg, M. (2012, Aug. 20). Recruitment in the 21st Century: Joining the Social Media Revolution. Human Resources iQ. Retrieved from http://www.humanresourcesiq.com/talent-management/articles/recruitment-in-the-21st-century-joining-the-social/#.UUlMkBxTC9E. Read More