Essay Sample on Kobo Leverages Ripple Platform to Enhance Social Media Recruiting

Introduction

Various companies utilize social media in their enlisting process. Kobo is one of the companies that use social broadcasting. It is a global e-book retailer that is in Toronto. Kobo uses a social media platform known as Ripple; Ripple is a form of social feed that has various modules that allow this organization to not only share feedback but also enhances tracking as well as rallying behind the organization's goal (Ayres 1541). The platform also can acknowledge employees immediately, track the engagements that surround goals and actions, share organizational updates, and also the creation of social feeds that appear on the organization's TVs.

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Social media also helped the company's vice president Jenifer Ricci in maintaining consistent external messages and setting up internal recruiting functions. According to Ricci, social media has simplified her work because the company has very many employees who are active in social media as bloggers, thought leaders, thinkers, and creators with extensive social networks. The employees are, therefore, a tool known as Jobvite that enables them to reach out to people within their networks and notify them of the vacant positions as well as the requirements to qualify as an employee (Ayres 1541). Ricci further states that this model is successful as they no longer rely much on external recruiting firms neither do, they use job boards.

Another company that uses social media in recruiting is Ocean Nutrition Canada (ONC); the company supplies Omega-3 ingredients and has many employees. This company uses various sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Petri dish, and Canadian bio-economy job sites. The organization joined the social media for three reasons which are; creating Omega-3 awareness in a platform that it can talk about itself, translating the awareness into an employee brand to drive top-quality talents in its website, and seeking best potential employees across the globe.

University of British Columbia (UBC), an institution that hosts over forty thousand students and nine thousand, also utilizes social media recruiting staff and faculty, also uses social media recruiting. Social media platforms give the HR department a voice in an institution where being heard is a challenge. UBC's HR department began to use social media in 2009 via twitter feeds and blogs as a way of pushing information out and also stimulating conversations and getting employee feedback (Stelios 183). The twitter feed is used for a wide range of functions, which include notifying students and staff of available opportunities, job posting, and conveying new beneficial information (Stelios 183). Only one HR staff member is responsible for filtering tweets and posts and training employees on the effective use of social mass media and the etiquette that needs to be upheld.

The Impact of Social Media Recruiting in Business

Social media recruiting saves companies a lot of money. For instance, Ricci stated that recruiting via social media is extremely cost-effective as the company saves a huge amount on recruiting that is invested back in training employees to help them gain the necessary skills and experience. Another advantage of social broadcasting recruiting is that it enables a company to reach out to great minds in their hangouts since most of them do not send job applications. Also, unlike the traditional recruiting method that is expensive and slow, social media recruiting is fast and convenient.

Also, companies that engage in social media build a strong brand experience; hence it gets more attractive to customers, potential, and even the current employees due to the acquired well-built brand name. Social media is, therefore, a perfect tool in building a good reputation for the organization. Once a brand is built, it is also reinforced in the minds of customers. In summation, social media has the following impacts on a business; promotion of open communication amid management and employees, enhance effective sharing of work and projects between employees boosting the sharing of experiences and knowledge (Stelios 183). Social media also enables companies to have better content like videos and webcasts as opposed to companies that use simple texts.

There is also a collaborative communication between a company and its potential and current customers in issues like product development, receiving feedback, product definition and all forms of customer support and service (Stelios 183). Besides, social media gives a business a perfect discussion venue enabling it to attain the classic goal of communications and marketing if the employees stick to the social media rules and etiquette.

The downside of using social media in recruitment is that, once an organization settles on using it, then it must be committed; hence a company cannot just dabble into it. Secondly, it is only effective if the organization resources to the social media of choice accordingly since it is labor-intensive. For instance, Wilson, the vice president of ONC, explained that they had not expanded to twitter due to a lack of monitoring staff to give timely responses. The employees can easily misuse social media. For instance, in 2008, some nurses misused the Facebook platform by giving unauthorized reports on a shift change, where they included specific patients' information to their colleagues in the next shift (Ayres 1541). The information was swiftly passed to friends hence a violation of federal privacy regulations (Ayres 1541). Lastly, social media gives businesses a false sense of security because although a message has the intended audience, once posted, the company lacks full control; hence it may leave a perpetual digital footprint. For instance, a link can be forwarded, and tweets retweeted; hence site security settings lack true public exclusions which compromises the information privacy.

Works Cited

Ayres, Elaine J. "The Impact of Social Media on Business and Ethical Practices in Dietetics." Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, doi: 10.1016/j.jand.2013.09.020 vol. 113, no. 11, 2013, pp. 1539-1543.

Canadian HR Reporter. "How is HR using social media?" News & Trends for HR Professionals | Canadian HR Reporter, 21 Nov. 2011, www.hrreporter.com/news/hr-news/how-is-hr-using-social-media/314067. Accessed 16 Mar. 2020.

Stelios, S. "Business Ethics and Social Media." Proceedings of The 3rd Human and Social Sciences at the Common Conference, 2015, doi:10.18638/hassacc.2015.3.1.183.