SUBJECT: Strategic HRM

SUBMITTED TO: Prof Ekta Sharma

DATE: 23rd September, 2020

TOPIC
Social Media And its Impact on HR Practices

SUBMITTED BY
NAME ROLL NO
Amrit Parmar AU1914017
Sampada Ghodki AU1914027
Seema Raghani AU1914045
Princy Mehta AU1914051
Valerie Ann D’Cruz AU1914085

1
Contents
Objective ....................................................................................................................................................... 3
Literature Review .......................................................................................................................................... 3
Research Design ............................................................................................................................................ 5
Data collection .............................................................................................................................................. 6
Analysis ......................................................................................................................................................... 7
Findings ......................................................................................................................................................... 8
Conclusion ..................................................................................................................................................... 8
References .................................................................................................................................................... 9
Annexure ..................................................................................................................................................... 10
Interview Schedule ................................................................................................................................. 10
Interview Questions ................................................................................................................................ 10

2
Social media plays a very important role in the way we communicate and maintain relations with
our friends, family and colleagues. Social media platforms allow people to share their life events,
views on social and political events. Social media helps the company to understand their
employees in a better way. It helps to understand the lifestyle, likes - dislikes, choices and
preferences.

Social media platforms have speed of recruitment process. Sometimes, these platforms are also
used to take 360-degree feedback.

Companies also need to manage their social media page effectively in order to attract and engage
right set of people. Different Social media strategies need to be used while deciding the campaign
material like media mix, content type, channel, target audience, etc. Companies can ask employees
to follow certain pages, sites or blogs as a part of their training process.

Society of Human Resource Management India recognizes top 30 human resource influencers who
would have created the best social media presence in a year.

Objective
The objective of this research is to understand the impact of social media on companies. We will
try to understand whether the company prefers using social media, which media platform they use,
and understanding the advantages and disadvantages of using social media.

Literature Review
Human resource management practices have evolved over the years to align with shifts in
technology, economy, globalization, talent diversity and business strategy, with practices intended
to solve business problems. Increased globalization, competition and the pressure for speed and
innovation mandates differentiated HR practices which enable attracting, motivating, and retaining
a talented workforce, a factor critical to business success. The “war for talent” continues, with
organizations trying to identify high quality individuals who not only meet the functional and
technical needs of the jobs, but also demonstrate a fit with the organizations’ values.
Simultaneously, research on employee recruitment continues with multiple studies addressing
recruitment objectives, strategies, intervening job applicant variables and recruitment activities
and processes. It becomes extremely crucial for HR practices to evolve more broad-based
recruiting methods to discover skilled applicants, train them and retain, required to support
organizational growth. Furthermore, targeted recruitment has also attracted little attention from
researchers, and the need for research on targeted recruitment and the use of data science and
intelligence tools within human resources has been emphasized.
(Dutta, 2018)
Online recruitment has the advantage of reciprocal communication, where the candidate and the
recruiter may communicate with each other at minimal cost. There are also several challenges that
3
online hiring brings. The launch and maintenance costs of online hiring systems are high, and it
requires hiring of personnel competent in dealing with the technology. Secondly, the number of
candidates obtained through job boards is often extremely large, making optimal scanning
difficult. Thirdly, there are also concerns of breach of confidential data and security, as platforms
might store resumes for later references. Inducting new skills/capabilities into the organization
would influence the organizations’ definition of key labor competitors, pay positioning with
respect to the market, choice and/or expansion of the market basket used for compensation
benchmarking, which in turn could dilute the benchmark relevance etc. The HR function was
expected to provide informed decisions around costs of hiring/re-locating talent/upskilling
talent/attrition trends and costs of attrition for future state talent needs of the organization. Absence
of clear and dynamic data made these decisions challenging (Dutta, 2018).
Employee Engagement
A few organizations utilize a corporate Facebook page to impart new projects or approaches to
their workers. A key advantage is that representatives can respond to declarations promptly with
remarks or questions. Different managers utilize a corporate blog or video sharing to keep workers
around the globe occupied with customary gatherings. Web-based media can be a brilliant device
for rapidly dispersing data on the condition of the association and have all representatives feel
included, causing them to feel more associated and more an aspect of the association and its central
goal.
Knowledge Sharing and Collaboration
Social media gives an incredible chance to use the profound and various expertise numerous
associations. As opposed to go to outside specialists or outsider suppliers, organizations can outfit
inside ability with apparatuses, including microblogging, wikis, YouTube-like vaults of learning
recordings, master catalogs or networks of practice. Internal conversation sheets or online media
spaces permit representatives to team up and trade thoughts and encounters. These tools are
likewise being utilized for self-service benefits enrollment, matching current employees to open
positions and more (Managing and Leveraging Workplace Use of Social Media, 2016).

The advancement in network-based technology has encouraged a greater number of people to be

on social network sites (SNS). Different members of society, including people of all ages and
social classes are using SNS. Inside organizations, SNS may help users on connection,
collaboration and communication. Currently, use of SNS is trending that we come to the point
where monitoring, of SNS activities, may bring greater benefits to company performance. Thus,
human resource (HR) plays an important role in this paradigm shift, as it should understand, adapt
and disseminate new guidelines within the organization.
Training and Development
Training refers to the strategies used to offer employees the skills they need to carry out their jobs.
Development includes acquiring expertise, abilities, and behavior that improve employee’s ability
to meet the challenges of a variety of new or existing jobs. Companies are adopting new technique

4
of learning portals where they are putting more information directly into employees' hands. Instead
of limiting training opportunities to teacher-led conventional classes or to periodic training
sessions, training can be made available 24*7. Through this facility employees can learn at their
own pace, when they want to. In addition to the increased availability and flexibility, SNS allow
users to interact with others during training and development. Thus, SNS allow users to exchange
experiences, share knowledge and gain access to experts worldwide.
Performance Management
Performance management is the process through which organization ensure that employees are
working toward organizational goals. The manager defines the employee's goals and work,
develops the employee's skills and capabilities, continuously assess the person's goal centered
behavior, and then rewards him or her so that their morale gets boosted and both the company's
needs and the person's career aspirations get fulfilled.
In this sense, SNS can be used as a way to circulate organizational, departmental and employees’
goals. The purpose of information sharing is to inform people about a decision, direction or
strategy with the goal. This brings even greater transparency in the system. Parameters on which
evaluation happens are- (1) procrastination of work can be determined by time spent by the
employee in SNS; (2) Customer satisfaction can be determined by the fact that number of customer
complaints on SNS as well as comments involving the company name. Content posted on SNS
helps the HR professionals to monitor the employee’s performance and take management
decisions. (Yokoyama, 2016)
Collaboration and Communication
The use of social media for collaboration and communication is promising as it is used in the areas
as Organizational or policy communication, virtual meetings, technical discussions and employee
recognition. But the availability of new technology and mobile devices pose a significant challenge
for Organization. The availability of “on demand tools” could be a double-edged sword as the
information is easily accessible, but organization may not be prepared to deal with data security
and privacy issues if a device is lost. To fix this many advanced companies use internal, secure
versions of instant messaging, YouTube, Twitter, and virtual classrooms to collaborate. (Zafar M)

Research Design
The research is exploratory in nature. Here, there is knowledge about social media and its effect
on HR practices, but there is lack of understanding in which direction and to what extent it affects
HR practices. Thus the whole research is carried out in order to understand the different variables
and perceptions HR professionals have towards social media along with social media practices in
different companies of various sizes and industries to get a broader understanding about the topic.

5
A structured interview will be conducted on 5 different HR professionals through the telephonic
method to gather information relevant to the topic at hand. The questions within the structured
interview are open ended questions as well as direct questions. Open ended questions will help
give us detailed information about company workings and social media. Close ended questions
will help make direct comparisons between different companies on similar variables about social
media.

Data collection
HR personnel from 5 companies were interviewed. And the following is the information about
those companies:

Company Industry Number of Number of

employees HR

IRM CADAgro 3000 10

Torrent Power Business Utility 2600 40

Secure meters Electronic Energy 650 5

meters

KICT (Kandala International Shipping & Logistic 200 4

Container Terminal) Services

Tatvic Analytical utility 130 6

6
Analysis
Not all companies have handbooks, which specifically mention about the usage of social media in
office. Some companies have policy documents which say so. Torrent and KICT strictly prohibit
posting anything pertaining to the company. There are dos and don’ts about this policy in the
employee handbook. For manufacturing companies, the workers are not allowed to use social
media as their work is very rigorous and needs concentration. These are only applicable when
using the company network – WiFi. At Torrent & KICT, the employees are not allowed to access
any of these sites on the company’s system. They may use it on their personal devices.
Companies do not waste a lot of time, monitoring the activities of the employees; only if they find
something controversial, they may take stringent action against the employee. Most companies
prefer hiring via LinkedIn more than any other social media platform. For companies who don’t
hire via social media, prefer to hire via referrals or internal hiring. This was observed for the larger
companies, as for the smaller companies, they prefer social media as a tool for hiring. IRM
personnel believed that even though social media gave access to a larger pool of candidates, the
quality of the hires cannot be determined correctly and yield ratio too is very low; as low as “1:100”
as mentioned by them. One of the most important reason for companies using social media is
advertisement; since these companies do not use social media for recruitment or advertisement,
these companies do that only via company websites and companies do use social media, prefer
LinkedIn as an effective tool to advertise.
Only smaller organizations find using social media, effective for hiring or other HR functions as
compared to larger organizations. One of the major advantages all the companies felt for using
social media is “rewards and recognition”. Companies post theirs and their employees’
achievements on these platforms in order to “engage with the employees” and to boost morale.
KICT uses “Facebook Workplace”, Secure meters uses “YouTube” to promote employees and
conduct activities, Tatvic posts congratulatory messages for employees on LinkedIn. For
companies who use social media for recruitment especially, were also not able to save upon cost
as buying the premium versions of softwares, gaining access to premium databases, incurs cost
and the return on this investment is not guaranteed.
The biggest fear today is one’s company’s data being accessible to their competitors or for that
matter to anybody else. The companies feel that no matter how stringent the rules and policies are,
social media could be tool for data leakage which will give a bad reputation to the company.

7
Findings
• Bigger companies like Torrent Power, IRM, don’t think much about branding. They are
monopolistic players and people will join this organization for that.
• Social media recruitment companies are less in number, so most companies use referrals
and internal hiring.
o The lower yield ratio also suggests that the candidates which are hired are only
good at presenting themselves during the interviews and writing fancy CVs,
o Workwise, not much can be predicted using that; for which even more robust
selection processes are required which will lead to higher costs.
o For lower position jobs, social media works well as a recruiting tool, however, it is
a waste of resources to use social media for recruiting and selecting top
management candidates.
• Smaller companies prefer social media because branding is important for them.
• Productivity is not really impacted whether social media is used for the employees or not.

Conclusion
Even though the use of social media has exploded and magnified in all spheres of life, a strategic
and standardized use of it has not been achieved by a lot of companies in a developing country like
India. In the present scenario, a vast number of companies are skeptical towards the usage of social
media as a tool for recruitment or selection for a varied reason, due to which, traditional ways of
recruitment and selection prevail the market. Social media is also being viewed as an enemy more
than an ally because of the quality of candidates it brings in comes with more cons than pros for
all the companies.
However, there are several companies which have successfully managed to change, which also
means, the war is not lost. Once Indian companies learn to modify their usage of social media in a
way that could attract talented and skilled candidates, recruitment and selection processes will go
through a transformation as well. Most companies have also not managed to use social media as
an effective tool for employee benefits are assistance, but once that is learnt, employee relations
and brand perceptions towards companies will encounter transformation.

8
References
Dutta, D. (2018, June 6). Social Media and Technology Trends in HRM: Cases in Recruitment
and Talent Management. intechopen.
Managing and Leveraging Workplace Use of Social Media. ( 2016, January 19). shrm.
Yokoyama, M. H. (2016). How are Social Networking Sites changing the employee-employer
relationship and what are the next challenges for Human Resources? REGE-Management
Magazine, 23(1). Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rege.2015.11.001
Zafar M, R. N. (n.d.). Social Media and HR Practices. Retrieved from
https://www.academia.edu/6902619/Social_Media_and_HR_Practices

9
Annexure
Interview Schedule
Company Time & Date

IRM 22nd September, 9:30 a.m.

Torrent Power 15th September, 8.25 p.m.

Secure meters 13th September, 6.00 p.m.

KICT 19th September, 7.30 p.m.

Tatvic 19th September, 10.00 a.m.

Interview Questions
1. Does your organization have an employee handbook? Are there policies in the employee
handbook in regards to employees’ use of social media?
2. Does your organization restrict the use of social media sites to employees?
3. Are employees allowed to go on their social media sites while at work?
4. Are employees’ social media accounts monitored?
5. Does your organization use social media in recruitment of employees? Which ones?
6. How does your organization advertise job positions?
7. Does the human resource manager review potential applicants’ social media profile
during the selection process?
8. How effective do you think social media sites are in selection?
9. Does your organization use social media sites in order to recognize employee
accomplishments (ex. Employee of the month)?
10. Does social media help with making your organization more connected with its
employees? How?
11. Has your organization saved money by using social media as a recruitment tool?
12. What advantages does social media provide to organization? Please briefly explain.
13. Disadvantages of using Social Media sites

10
14. Overall, do you think the disadvantages outweigh the advantages in using social media
sites?
15. What are the major issues of using social media?
16. Any thought about the subject of social media?

11