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Introduction
Social media (SM) is changing human interaction and the way in which individuals access personal information in the expanding online environment. SM is an example of a discontinuous innovation – a new product that establishes new behavior patterns (Assael, 1984) – and is influencing the way human resource (HR) professionals recruit, screen, hire and terminate employees (Brandenburg, 2008; Brown and Vaughn, 2011; Clark and Roberts, 2010; Davison et al., 2011; Slovensky and Ross, 2011). As noted by Davidson et al. (2011, p. 1), “Technology is now set to revolutionize the way HR management is conducted”. Preliminary research suggests that despite growing use and interest in SM platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, there is ambiguous understanding of the term “social media”. Kaplan and Haenlein (2010) describe SM as a group of Internet-based applications that operate on the foundations of Web 2.0 and user-generated content (UGC). Driven by the technical (e.g. increased hardware capacity and access to Internet), economic (UGC creation tools) and social (e.g. Generation Y engagement with technology) influences of Web 2.0 (Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010), the adoption of SM has been exponential. Recent data show the majority of Internet using males (63 per cent) and females (75 per cent) are using an SM platform (Pew Internet, 2012). Although SM applications were originally developed for social reasons, businesses are now using these applications to interact with customers and potential employees in the online space.
Recent HR research suggests use of SM for recruitment and screening of new employees; however, many of these studies are outside the academic realm, and no studies address the topic from a hotel perspective. Consequently, data reported across studies are quite varied. For example, a study by Jobvite (2011), conducted with a sample of 800 HR and recruiting professionals, reported that the majority of companies are using SM to recruit (89 per cent) and screen candidate profiles (45 per cent), whereas a 2011 survey of 541 randomly selected HR and recruiting professionals conducted by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) reported that significantly fewer companies use social networks to recruit (56 per cent) and screen candidate profiles (18 per cent) (SHRM, 2011a). Although these findings are a general starting point, there is a gap in the...