Determinants and pre-hire outcomes of social recruiting technology adoption and use: an Australian study

 Social Recruiting technologies such as LinkedIn and Twitter have been fast emerging as one of the modern recruitment methods. However, research on their effective usage is scarce and outpaced by organisational practice. The current study addresses this gap by investigating the drivers of SR technology adoption on one hand, and their pre-hire outcomes on the other.

Exploring factors driving social recruiting: the case of Australian organisations

This study identifies key factors driving the organizational adoption of Social Recruiting (SR) technologies, such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. The Technology, Organization and Environment (TOE) framework, as an initial exploratory approach, is used to identify underlying factors of new technology adoption. Qualitative evidence collected from twelve Australian firms serves to specifically categorise key determinants of the organizational adoption of social recruiting technologies. It is found that, apart from several technology, organization and environment factors that significantly influence the organizational decision-making with reference to social recruiting, top management support is seen as imperative for successful adoption of recruiting technologies. Formalisation, comprehensiveness, and strategic orientation of organizational human resource departments are closely linked to adoption of social recruiting at the firm level. In addition, job applicants’ readiness and local success stories have driven firms to adopt social recruiting technologies. The study extends and modifies the TOE model to provide the theoretical foundations of social recruiting in the context of Australian organizations and help human resource professionals and practitioners to gain a better understanding of key drivers of organizational social recruiting.

Designing locative and social media technologies for community collaboration and social benefit : PetSearch

The convergence of locative and social media with collaborative interfaces and data visualisation has expanded the potential of online information provision. Offering new ways for communities to share contextually specific information, it presents the opportunity to expand social media’s current focus on micro self-publishing with applications that support communities to actively address areas of local need. This paper details the design and development of a prototype application that illustrates this potential. Entitled PetSearch, it was designed in collaboration with the Animal Welfare League of Queensland to support communities to map and locate lost, found and injured pets, and to build community engagement in animal welfare issues. We argue that, while established approaches to social and locative media provide a useful foundation for designing applications to harness social capital, they must be re-envisaged if they are to effectively facilitate community collaboration. We conclude by arguing that the principles of user engagement and co-operation employed in this project can be extrapolated to other online approaches that aim to facilitate co-operative problem solving for social benefit.

Students’ Use and Perceptions of Social Networking Technologies: Connections to Reading, Reading Ability, and Self-Perception

Abstract This study was undertaken to examine traditional forms of literacy and the newest form of literacy: technology. Students who have trouble reading traditional forms of literacy tend to have lower self-esteem. This research intended to explore if students with reading difficulties and, therefore, lower self-esteem, could use Social Networking Technologies including text messaging, Facebook, email, blogging, MySpace, or Twitter to help improve their self-esteem, in a field where spelling mistakes and grammatical errors are commonplace, if not encouraged. A collective case study was undertaken based on surveys, individual interviews, and gathered documents from 3 students 9-13 years old. The data collected in this study were analyzed and interpreted using qualitative methods. These cases were individually examined for themes, which were then analyzed across the cases to examine points of convergence and divergence in the data. The research found that students with reading difficulties do not necessarily have poor self-esteem, as prior research has suggested (Carr, Borkowski, & Maxwell, 1991; Feiler, & Logan, 2007; Meece, Wigfield, & Eccles, 1990; Pintirch & DeGroot, 1990; Pintrich & Garcia, 1991). All of the participants who had reading difficulties, were found both through interviews and the CFSEI-3 self-esteem test (Battle, 2002) to have average self-esteem, although their parents all stated that their child felt poorly about their academic abilities. The research also found that using Social Networking Technologies helped improve the self-esteem of the majority of the participants both socially and academically.

Social Networking Technologies: Project Launch

Students taking the 20 credit version of the course (COMP6052) will work in groups of 6 to develop and design a new social networking tool/application/website. The teams will work on their design throughout the semester, and keep a design and development blog that will act as a digital portfolio of their work. At the end of the semester they will also be asked to submit an individual reflective summary that will outline their teams objectives and progress, their part in its progress, and a critical analysis of whether or not they were successful. At the end of the course teams will be asked to pitch their ideas to an interdisciplinary Dragon's Den style panel who will expect them to not only have created something that is technical viable, but will also want to see other economic, social, legal and ethical factors taken into consideration. In this presentation we explain the structure of the group project, what is expected in the blog, and explore some potential ideas to help students understand the scope of the work required. The outcome of the group project does not have to be a fully working piece of software, instead we are looking for a well developed idea that contains enough detail to be convincing to the panel.

Review of Social Networking Technologies

These slides are the review slides for COMP6051 and COMP6052 Social Networking Technologies, and show the significant lessons learned for each part of the course, and an example exam question and marks scheme.

Using internet enabled mobile devices and social networking technologies to promote exercise as an intervention for young first episode psychosis patients

Young people with first episode psychosis are at an increased risk for a range of poor health outcomes. In contrast to the growing body of evidence that suggests that exercise therapy may benefit the physical and mental health of people diagnosed with schizophrenia, there are no studies to date that have sought to extend the use of exercise therapy among patients with first episode psychosis. The aim of the study is to test the feasibility and acceptability of an exercise program that will be delivered via internet enabled mobile devices and social networking technologies among young people with first episode psychosis.

The interaction and collaboration of experienced teachers deploying social technologies

In this paper authors have discussed about creative approaches in building confidence of experienced teachers in using social networking technologies. Working in the collaborative ebook chapter authoring and editing gave an insight into the advantages of using social learning platforms. Authors of this paper argue that if experienced teachers are given such opportunities to work with international colleagues, it becomes less complicated for them to handle modern day tools in teaching and learning context.

Interaction, privacy and profiling considerations in local mobile social software : a prototype agile ride share system

Agile ridesharing aims to utilise the capability of social networks and mobile phones to facilitate people to share vehicles and travel in real time. However the application of social networking technologies in local communities to address issues of personal transport faces significant design challenges. In this paper we describe an iterative design-based approach to exploring this problem and discuss findings from the use of an early prototype. The findings focus upon interaction, privacy and profiling. Our early results suggest that explicitly entering information such as ride data and personal profile data into formal fields for explicit computation of matches, as is done in many systems, may not be the best strategy. It might be preferable to support informal communication and negotiation with text search techniques.

Managing Trust in Online Social Networks

In recent years, there is a dramatic growth in number and popularity of online social networks. There are many networks available with more than 100 million registered users such as Facebook, MySpace, QZone, Windows Live Spaces etc. People may connect, discover and share by using these online social networks. The exponential growth of online communities in the area of social networks attracts the attention of the researchers about the importance of managing trust in online environment. Users of the online social networks may share their experiences and opinions within the networks about an item which may be a product or service. The user faces the problem of evaluating trust in a service or service provider before making a choice. Recommendations may be received through a chain of friends network, so the problem for the user is to be able to evaluate various types of trust opinions and recommendations. This opinion or recommendation has a great influence to choose to use or enjoy the item by the other user of the community. Collaborative filtering system is the most popular method in recommender system. The task in collaborative filtering is to predict the utility of items to a particular user based on a database of user rates from a sample or population of other users. Because of the different taste of different people, they rate differently according to their subjective taste. If two people rate a set of items similarly, they share similar tastes. In the recommender system, this information is used to recommend items that one participant likes, to other persons in the same cluster. But the collaborative filtering system performs poor when there is insufficient previous common rating available between users; commonly known as cost start problem. To overcome the cold start problem and with the dramatic growth of online social networks, trust based approach to recommendation has emerged. This approach assumes a trust network among users and makes recommendations based on the ratings of the users that are directly or indirectly trusted by the target user.

Using social media to facilitate knowledge transfer in complex engineering environments : a primer for educators

While highly cohesive groups are potentially advantageous they are also often correlated with the emergence of knowledge and information silos based around those same functional or occupational clusters. Consequently, an essential challenge for engineering organisations wishing to overcome informational silos is to implement mechanisms that facilitate, encourage and sustain interactions between otherwise disconnected groups. This paper acts as a primer for those seeking to gain an understanding of the design, functionality and utility of a suite of software tools generically termed social media technologies in the context of optimising the management of tacit engineering knowledge. Underpinned by knowledge management theory and using detailed case examples, this paper explores how social media technologies achieve such goals, allowing for the transfer of knowledge by tapping into the tacit and explicit knowledge of disparate groups in complex engineering environments.

Harnessing the power of real and virtual social networks during disasters

The mass media and emergency services organisations routinely gather information and disseminate it to the public. During disaster situations both the media and emergency services require acute situational awareness. New social media technologies offer opportunities to enhance situational awareness by crowd-sourcing information using real and virtual social networks. This paper documents how real and virtual social networks were used by a reporter and by members of the public to gather and disseminate emergency information during the flash flood disaster in Toowoomba and the Lockyer Valley in January 2011 and in the days and weeks after the disaster.

Social Media Sites as Online Information Grounds : An exploratory study of the ways in which Information Technology (IT) professionals experience social media

Social media tools are often the result of innovations in Information Technology and developed by IT professionals and innovators. Nevertheless, IT professionals, many of whom are responsible for designing and building social media technologies, have not been investigated on how they themselves use or experience social media for professional purposes. This study will use Information Grounds Theory (Pettigrew, 1998) as a framework to study IT professionals’ experience in using social media for professional purposes. Information grounds facilitates the opportunistic discovery of information within social settings created temporarily at a place where people gather for a specific purpose (e.g., doctors’ waiting rooms, office tea rooms etc.), but the social atmosphere stimulates spontaneous sharing of information (Pettigrew, 1999). This study proposes that social media has the qualities that make it a rich information grounds; people participate from separate “places” in cyberspace in a synchronous manner in real-time, making it almost as dynamic and unplanned as physical information grounds. There is limited research on how social media platforms are perceived as a “place,” (a place to go to, a place to gather, or a place to be seen in) that is comparable to physical spaces. There is also no empirical study on how IT professionals use or “experience” social media. The data for this study is being collected through a study of IT professionals who currently use Twitter. A digital ethnography approach is being taken wherein the researcher uses online observations and “follows” the participants online and observes their behaviours and interactions on social media. Next, a sub-set of participants will be interviewed on their experiences with and within social media and how social media compares with traditional methods of information grounds, information communication, and collaborative environments. An Evolved Grounded Theory (Glaser, 1992) approach will be used to analyse tweets data and interviews and to map the findings against the Information Ground Theory. Findings from this study will provide foundational understanding of IT professionals’ experiences within social media, and can help both professionals and researchers understand this fast-evolving method of communications.