It was inevitable, really: companies rely more and more on social nNetworking for HR purposes.
OK, LinkedIn was already heavily used by HR departments for the recruitment effort. But now it looks like everyone is becoming aware that LinkedIn is not the only tool that can help companies hire the right people for the right position.
According to a study by Potentialpark, it seems that LinkedIn is, of course, viewed as the online resource for career-related networking, but companies seem to want to go a step further than relying only on this kind of self-advertising before hiring people. Facebook is gaining weight in the decision making process, "because that's where most of the visible interaction happens".
Aside from the fact that on Facebook people are more open, honest and likely to interact, the findings of the study reveal that our strongest belief is the trend to follow: networking is not only the biggest and most important tool for sales people, social networking is also becoming a must for HR departments if they want to work in high quality recruitment.
Having a Facebook company page and interact with future employees is only the first step. But being able to browse or search through the gathered overall (social media) connections of all your employees for new people and then being able to get the proper and trusted feedback about them is just taking the game to a whole different level.