Alessandro Gandini on Social Recruiting and Digitised Labour Market

The digital revolution has brought enormous change in the way people work, but scholars are still grappling with the contours of this epochal transformation — one that, for sure, is still in its infancy. It is not only the workplace, but the labour market in all its components that has been radically altered. Alessandro Gandini has illustrated at the last session of the Interdisciplinary Labour Studies Group at Middlesex University how the labour market has been disrupted by ‘social recruiting’, the system through which labour supply and demand meet on the social media. Alessandro and his research partner Ivana Pais (Catholic University of Milan), in collaboration with Adecco, have surveyed 17,000 job seekers and 1,500 recruiters to examine the way they meet and interact online. The results have pointed to both a greater scrutiny of prospective candidates from employers, but also a great autonomy of job seekers in managing their ‘self-branding’.

The use of search engines and social media has proved highly disruptive of the way employers select a candidate. Practices vary from checking the accuracy of a CV through a search engine to the invasive one, more common in the United States, of requesting the candidate’s Facebook password. This would confirm how social recruiting represents a threat as well as an opportunity. On the other hand, job seekers are able to understand, through sites such as Glassdoor, where users leave anonymous reviews, how a specific company recruits and operates. Sometimes interview questions and experiences are shared online providing important insights into the process. Data show that 29% of job seekers in the sample have been contacted by a recruiter for an interview at least once via online means. Yet, only 9% of them ended up getting the job — a figure that witnesses how the interview event — and the face to face meeting this entails — maintains a strong relevance in the hiring process.

LinkedIn is no doubt the major player in the field of ‘social recruiting’. Recruiters scout for talent on the profile pages of LinkedIn, with the result that desirable individuals are inundated with expression of interest in their CV. This is particularly the case for IT and Knowledge workers, but it is a phenomenon that it is extending in other sectors too. This pairs up with the now common phenomenon of start-ups and digital enterprises that, not owning large HR budgets, regularly use digital media and especially LinkedIn to search for talented employees”. From the point of view of the job seekers, the platform, now valued in billions, provides the chance to manage one’s own self-branding and in general one’s own online reputation. Gandini argues that one particular aspect that is valued by employer is the size and quality of the network of contacts that a candidate is embedded in. This is an indicator of professional competence and maturity, and possibly beneficial to the employer. Conversely, traces of inadequate or offensive content on social media can easily disqualify a candidate. Overall, online reputation has emerged in the past few years as a key element in the assessment of a candidate.

Eventually, Gandini suggests that the existence of a shared cultural conception of reputation as value has a large impact. It may affect not only the way in which supply and demand meet, but also professional advancement, autonomy and control as well as the work performance particularly in contexts traditionally characterised by flexible and precarious employment, such as the cultural and media industries.