digital literacies: recruitment and graduate internet user skills

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Digital Literacies: Recruitment and Graduate Internet User Skills by Britta Bohlinger, 2009

First published on: http://britbohlinger.wordpress.com/2009/11/21/recruitment-and-graduate-internet-user-skills/

Contact via: http://britbohlinger.wordpress.com

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The case observed: This week I overheard a discussion between a few financial

professionals. They threw in their collective knowledge about sushi and Aberdeen, Scotland.

Apparently there are no sushi bars in Aberdeen and those folks up in the very North East of

our island are poor souls who have to travel down to London in order to get a bite of cold fish

and rice. While they argued back and forth I googled it – turns out there are 7 sushi

restaurants listed in Aberdeen. I had suspected no less but it left me puzzled that those

professionals with iPhones and internet access right in front of them rather resorted to

making themselves look less than smart than simply checking the facts.

Current recruitment practices: The same applies to recruitment processes. Understanding

what sort of personality you are about to employ is still based on relatively old-fashioned

conversations, going through CV (resume, Lebenslauf) data, checking references – all a bit

slow and ignorant of the possibilities we could harness. Senior executives in charge of

making final decisions about recruitment of graduates still believe you need to sign up for

Twitter in order to ‘read it’. There is a profound lack of skills in making use of the

considerable amount of data many graduates provide on the net.

Recruitment 2.0: Accessible to anyone involved in the recruitment process and able to pull

the strands together, it won’t need to be the images of drunk nights out on Facebook that are

compromising. That might be the worst case scenario only. Someone briefing decision-

makers would go and search for patterns in order to see whether the applicant may fit in

beyond the bare facts and if so, to what degree.

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Questions that matter most when recruiting staff, which are not easily assessed in

personal conversations, might be:

• What sort of moods does the applicant reveal? Stable? Erratic?

• What kind of friends or conversational partners does the applicant engage with?

What’s the tone of these conversations? Any consumer forums or communities that

show technical or social skills?

• Any skills that match the CV or are perhaps not even mentioned – check Youtube,

Flickr etc.

• Does the applicant appear to ignore copyrights or infringe others’ rights?

Internet usage skills are complex and reveal a lot more about a person than many keep

thinking. While typical assessment practices provide nothing more than a snapshot of an

applicant on a day of all effort being made to look good, the internet research will provide a

long-term profile that says a lot more about potential employees with regard to:

• team working including group blogging and

• feedback skills including taking in and learning from criticism

• broader communication skills and

• general networking, dealing with ’spam contacts’ as well as

• digital media ethics

In control of social media: That is potentially a lot more and a lot more of a holistic picture

than we could ever be able to find out in conventional recruitment talks. Smart and skilled

applicants will make sure they have privacy settings in place for personal conversations that

will not be haunting them in these kind of situations. It’s a question of being in command of

the social media you are using rather than being controlled by technology in non-desired

ways. Employers and applicants – as well as old media – frequently seem to hold less

differentiated views on this.

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Employers lacking online identities: The very same applies to the applicant perspective,

they are free – and should make use of it – to check their future employer and senior staff’s

profiles. If there is no online identity searchable, not even a few hits that bring up names in

relation to conferences or affiliations to professional bodies, this conveys an equally strong

message.

Informed decision making: After all, what we want, is making informed decisions. It’s not

about sneaking into people’s personal lives and moralising about their life styles as some

may argue, rather, it is about finding suitable matches and making sure you won’t need to

waste a few months in real [business] life together before the mismatch becomes all too

evident. Deeper level digital literacies in this sense reveal more about your communication

skills, technical expertise and willingness to engage with new developments in creative ways

than any standardised assessment or interviewing could ever demonstrate.

From an applicant’s perspective this may mean the future employer who is not represented

online beyond a conventional website and possibly a client newsletter may also nurture a

corporate culture marked by a low level of sharing and collaborating. This provides

indicators that any applicant may want to follow up in a personal interview in order to find out

what the future chances of the organisation may be. But also, and more importantly, the

applicant may want to signalise awareness of market dynamics beyond the immediate

industry or sector in question as well as a sense of connectivity which is vital in today’s

competitive markets.

digital literacies: recruitment and graduate internet user skills

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