Social media can be used effectively to recruit new staff members. Social media is the greatest online research tool since Google, if you want to find something out about a certain person. It is quite possible to recruit someone via social media, but if you use social media as a means of researching the qualities and background of personnel, then you have a potentially powerful tool.
The new Facebook Graph Search may soon be your first port of call on social media. Users may gain recommendations from people they trust on a 
whole range of things, from the best restaurant to whom you should hire. With the graph search, a user will be able to search for people via their interests. The things that people like may affect their employability. Recruiters will be able to target future employees and profile people before interviewing them.
Recruiters can use the Facebook’s Graph Search function to look for people whose personalities align with those of other people in the company. Personality clashes may be a thing of the past. Not only that, but a recruiter may be able to find a person who is the right cultural fit.
Social media analytic tools and things such as Facebook’s Graph Search may allow recruiters to locate those hard-to-find candidates. There are some people out there with very specific skills, and who have them in just the right mix. Using social media analytical tools, or tools such Facebook’s Graph Search, a company can narrow down the field and locate these people with very specific skill sets.
Radian6 is an analytical tool that will help you to find out if your candidate’s profile is actually a real one. As you can imagine, when people start learning that they can get a job through social media, they will stop clicking “like” for Jackass movies and start clicking “like” for management books. A high level of insincerity is due to wash over social media sites globally. Radian6 is an analytic tool that will put a stop to this.
The Radian6 tool can be used to aggregate conversations into visuals. So if your candidate’s Twitter and Facebook make him or her look like an employable angel, you can set the analytic tool to work for you. A profile may say that he or she is religious, whereas Radian6 could pull up all the references that he/she has made to porn, violence and sex over the last six months across 150 million public sites. All of a sudden, the candidate who claims to be purer than pure may actually have a decidedly unsavory online presence.
Analytic tools are also good for checking the validity of a person’s statements. He or she may claim to be an active speaker in your industry/market/community. Yet a tool such as Radian6 or Alterian SM2 could show a distinct online void; an online void that should be filled with comments by the candidate, and comments from other people about the candidate’s speaking and involvement. On the other hand, it could show that the candidate is an active speaker on a certain subject, and may even expose a heavy fan base that even the candidate does not know about.
Social media could very well prove to be the recruitment tool that revolutionizes the way people are hired and fired.