A survey on the current status of e-recruitment adoption in Hong Kong

A survey on the current status of e-recruitment adoption in Hong Kong

JOSEPH KIM-KEUNG HO

Independent Trainer

Hong Kong, China

Abstract: In spite of the reported research works on e-recruitment for more than ten years, academic study on e-recruitment adoption in Hong Kong are still uncommon. At the same time, e-recruitment practices have experienced major recent changes partly due to the impacts of social media, resulting in a new form of e-recruitment, namely, social recruiting. This paper reviews the literature of e-recruitment and reports a Facebook-based questionnaire survey finding on e-recruitment adoption in Hong Kong. The main survey findings confirm the prevalence (thus importance) of e-recruitment in human resource management in Hong Kong although social recruiting has not yet reached the mature stage of widespread adoption by all organizations and job-seekers as at 2015. This study, by revealing the present e-recruitment adoption status in Hong Kong, should be of practical and academic values to human resource practitioners and academics as well as individual job seekers.

Key words: e-recruitment; Facebook-based questionnaire survey; human resource management; information technology capabilities; multiple regression analysis; social recruiting

Introduction

In the Human Resource Management field, employee recruitment practices have been undergoing much change since the dawning of the Internet era in the mid-90s. The reporting of e-recruitment in newspapers, professional and academic journals from time to time bears witness to this. Of late, there is another wave of major changes in e-recruitment created by the popularity of social media, which leads to the emergence of social recruiting practices. In view of the recent development in e-recruitment and scant publications on the topic in Hong Kong, the writer undertakes a literature review and a Facebook-based questionnaire survey on e-recruitment in Hong Kong, with particular attention to social recruiting. The study is expected to produce findings of academic and practical values to human resource academics and job-seekers alike.

Basic ideas about recruitment and e-recruitment in Human Resource Management

A useful starting point to comprehend e-recruitment is to take a brief review of what recruitment is in Human Resource Management. According to Mondy et al. (2002), recruitment is “the process of attracting individuals on a timely basis, in sufficient numbers, and with appropriate qualifications, and encouraging them to apply for jobs with an organization.”. It is “the activity that links the employers and the job seekers” (Kapse et al., 2012). Furthermore, the recruitment process takes into consideration a number of factors: (i) external and internal environment, (ii) recruitment alternatives and (iii) recruitment sources and methods, both internal and external (Mondy et al., 2002).

Regarding recruitment practices in actuality, Krishnan (2014) identify two contemporary trends: (a) “recruiters becoming more like marketers” and (b) recruiters are “doing more with less”. Hudson Global Inc. (2014) reminds us that “When it comes to hiring, quality is everything… Yet, few organizations give quality of hire the attention it needs. Measuring the results of new recruits over time is the most effective way to refine hiring process…”. Meanwhile, many recruiting companies have been reported to believe that their organizations have been making wrong and costly hiring decisions (Glasner, 2015). Glasner (2015)’s article primarily stresses the importance of background screening to reduce hiring mistakes. Recruiting companies are having trouble to “acquire talents” partly due to difference of ideas on talent attraction factors between employers and employees (van Raaiji, 2015). Other than that, organizations are advised to heed the finding that “a negative experience would impact their [interviewees’] to buy products or services from the hiring organization in the future” (Alexander Mann Solutions’ (AMS) Candidates, Consumers and Your Global Brand report, cited by Cerullo (2014).). In short, there is no lack of challenges and advices on recruitment practices from the recruitment literature.

With regard to e-recruitment, the literature comes up with a number of terms on this topic, i.e., online recruitment (Parry and Tyson, 2008), internet recruitment (Suvankulov, 2013) and web-based recruitment (Ehrhart et al., 2012). Also, the explanations from different writers can be different, depending on the context and content used (Mwasha, 2013). In general, e-recruitment can be understood as “the use of online technology to attract and source candidates in the recruitment process” (Kapse et al., 2012). Kapse et al. (2012) compares the traditional recruitment and e-recruitment in terms of (i) attracting candidates, (ii) sorting applicants, (iii) making contact and (iv) closing the deal. Since around 2008, due to the fast growing popularity of the social media platforms, much professional and academic interest has been directed to a new form of e-recruitment, called social recruiting (Wikipedia, 2015). Specifically, social recruiting “is recruiting candidates by using social platforms as talent databases or for advertising” (Wikipedia, 2015). The social recruiting market involves a broad range of product categories, e.g., recruitment advertising, job boards, candidate relationship management, assessment, interview automation, applicant tracking, recruitment analytics, and job-seeker services, etc. (Bersin, 2012). Description of it can be found in Youtube, e.g., Campell (2012; 2013) and TweetMyJobs (2012) and academic sources, e.g., Vicknair et al. (2010) and Joos (2008). On this topic, Krishnan (2014) points out that LinkedIn, a social recruiting platform, is valuable for recruiting organizations to recruit talents who are very often passive job-seekers. In this paper, social recruiting is given special attention in the discussion.

E-recruiting practices and major players in Hong Kong

According to the AMS 2012 survey The Impact of Social Media on Recruitment and HR in Asia Pacific as cited by Cerrulo (2014), “Around a fifth of recruiters in Hong Kong and Singapore used social media to actively vet and screen candidates..”. Furthermore, the public profiles of job-seekers are now subjected to “more intense scrutiny” by recruiting organizations (Cerrulo, 2014). Nevertheless, Cerrulo (2014) laments that “Hong Kong’s firms typically use social media for HR on a piecemeal basis.....That makes it very hard to track success or calculate a return on investment picture”.

Intellectually, one way to comprehend the contemporary e-recruitment practices is to identify the types of Information Technology (IT) capabilities (Davenport and Short, 1990) having been employed by them. These Information Technology capabilities include transactional, geographical, automational, analytical, informational, sequential, knowledge management, tracking and disintermediation ones (Davenport and Short, 1990). Such capabilities enable various participants in e-recruitment to make process improvement, process re-engineering, transformation and ongoing renewal in their activities and business models (see Talwar (1994) for a brief discussion on the re-engineering spectrum.). Furthermore, the future impacts of IT can be estimated to be more profound when the social recruiting is taken as just the tip of iceberg of the Platform Economy (The Center for Global Enterprise, 2015). Other ways to study e-recruitment practices include examining e-recruitment adoption with the Technology Acceptance Model, e.g., Tong (2009) and Diffusion of Innovation Theory, e.g., Odumeru (2015) as well as with grounded theory (Wolfswinkel et al., 2010). Nonetheless, existing academic literature on e-recruiting in the Hong Kong context is scant. A google scholar search with the key words of “e-recruitment Hong Kong” returns only a few relevant and dated references, e.g., Tong and Sivanand (2005), and they are not devoted to the Hong Kong setting. By means of newspaper article study with the search engine of South China Morning Post, two additional pieces of news on e-recruiting in Hong Kong are obtained as follows:

News 1: “The last remaining Police Recruiting Centre in Admiralty will close on April 1. The force said it was now more efficient to handle applications on the Internet” (Wong, 2004).

News 2: “Ashley Steinbausen, solution director at Tal-os0asia, which specializes in recruitment process outsourcing,… said companies should develop structured hiring plans. A resourcing strategy should consist of a mixture of job boards, career sites, employee referrals, talent pools and recruitment agencies…” (Davis, 2007).

Overall, the search result from the South China Morning Post website is disappointing. On the positive side, there are a few useful papers on e-recruitment published in Human Resources, the Official Journal of the Hong Kong Institute of Human Resource Management, e.g. Cerruto (2014) and Krishnan (2014). As an alternative to doing literature search, it is more promising to research on e-recruitment by making direct observation of the websites in Hong Kong that involve e-recruitment functionality. These websites can be grouped by the major players actively involved in e-recruiting, see also Appendices 1 to 5. They are:

·       Social media platforms[1]: Examples are LinkedIn and Facebook

·       Employers’ own websites: Too numerous to mention. Examples are Human Resources of HKU (http://jobs.hku.hk/), PwC and Hang Seng Bank Job Openings.

·       Third-party job boards and recruitment agencies’ websites: Examples are RegionUP, Cpkobs.com, Recruit.com, Careerjet.hk, JobsDB.com, Monster and Xpatjobs.com.

Studying these websites as a form of content analysis and usability inspection is indeed feasible and can be revealing, but this task is not taken up in this paper. Instead, the paper reports on a Facebook-based questionnaire survey on e-recruitment practices in Hong Kong. Further details of the survey are provided in the next section.

Findings from a Facebook-based questionnaire survey on e-recruitment practices in Hong Kong

A Facebook-based questionnaire survey was conducted by the writer from May 25 to 29, 2015 on his Facebook. It made use of the free-of-charge survey tool provided by KwikSurveys.com. The targeted respondents are primarily his current and previous students who have joined the writer’s Facebook. There were 1,565 Facebook friends of the writers at the time of the survey and, via Facebook message invitation, 103 friends have participated in the survey. Interested readers are referred to Ho (2014) for a discussion on the research method of Facebook-based survey. The survey questions mainly cover three areas, namely, (i) the profile of the respondent, (ii) e-recruiting practice of the respondent’s employer and (iii) personal e-recruiting practice of the respondent, see Appendix 6 for the survey questions asked and related basic survey statistics. The main findings as follows:

I.               Basic findings as related to the respondent’s organization:

Finding 1: (re: survey question 9): 55 respondents (54.46%) replied that their organizations do not rely on printed newspapers for employee recruitment for vacancies of job similar to that of theirs; only 6 respondents (5.94%) replied that their organizations strongly rely on them to do so.

Finding 2: (re: survey question 10): 87 respondents (84.47%) replied that their organizations either strongly (i.e., a lot) or mildly rely on third-party job boards to recruit employees for vacancies of job similar to theirs.

Finding 3: (re: survey question 11): 56 respondents (54.37%) replied that their organizations either strongly or mildly rely on their organizations’ own websites to recruit employees for vacancies of job similar to theirs.

Finding 4: (re: survey question 12): 17 respondents (16.51%) replied that their organizations either strongly or mildly rely on social media platforms to recruit employees for vacancies of job that are similar to theirs.

Finding 5 (re: survey question 13): 69 respondents (67.64%) replied that their organizations either strongly or mildly rely on traditional recruitment agencies/ headhunters to recruit employees for vacancies of job that are similar to theirs.

Finding 6 (re: survey question 14): 73 respondents (70.88%) replied that their organizations either strongly or mildly rely on existing employees’ referrals to recruit for employees for vacancies of job similar to theirs.

Finding 7 (re: survey question 15): 32 respondents (31.37%) replied that their organizations either strongly or mildly rely on social media platforms to do job applicants’ screening for vacancies of job similar to theirs.

II.             Basic findings as related to the respondent’s own job seeking behaviour:

Finding 8 (re: survey question 16): 53 respondents (51.45%) either strongly or mildly rely on social media platforms for their own job seeking purpose. This indicates the importance of social media platforms as a source of job vacancies to job seekers.

Finding 9 (re: survey question 17): 70 respondents (69.31%) either strongly or mildly rely on potential employers’ organizational websites for their own job seeking purpose. This reflects the importance of these websites as a source of job vacancies to job seekers.

Finding 10 (re: survey question 18): 71 respondents (68.93%) either strongly or mildly rely on job boards for their own job seeking purpose. This shows the importance of these websites as a source of job vacancies to job seekers.

Finding 11 (re: survey question 19): 68 respondents (66.02%) either strongly or mildly rely on friends’ referrals for their own job seeking purpose. This indicates the importance of social media platforms as a source of job vacancies to job seekers.

Finding 12 (re: survey question 20): 40 respondents (39.22%) describe themselves as active job seekers while 43 respondents (42.16%) conceive themselves as passive job seekers. This shows that the majority of the respondents are job seekers.

III.           Additional findings via Excel’s data-filtering and querying on the survey database

Finding 13 (re: survey questions 4, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 and 15): Further subtotals of survey figures are summarized in the following Table (re: Table 1)[2], with only the response of “strongly rely on” being counted. The table specifically examines how the public and the private sectors differ in recruitment practices, including e-recruitment practices.

Table 1

	Public sector	Private sector
Total number	18	81
Recruitment via printed newspapers (question 9)	2 (11%)	4 (5%)
Recruitment via third-party job  boards (question 10)	5 (28%)	41 (51%)
Recruitment via employers' own websites (question 11)	6 (33%)	20 (25%)
Recruitment via social media platforms (question 12)	0 (0%)	6 (7%)
Recruitment via traditional recruitment agencies' hunters (question 13)	3 (17%)	29 (36%)
Recruitment via existing employees' referrals (question 14)	3 (17%)	31 (38%)
Job applicant screening via social media platform (question 15)	0 (0%)	4 (5%)

Table 1 indicates quite different recruitment approaches between the public and the private sectors, with the private sector employing a more commercial and informal recruitment approach than the public sector does. [Note: only those who replied with “strongly rely on” are counted in Table 1.]

Finding 14 (re: questions 5, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 and 15): A refined grouping of figures to study how company size[3] affects organizational recruitment practices is presented in Table 2. [Note: only those who replied with “strongly rely on” are counted in Table 2.]

Table 2

	Big organizations	Medium-sized organizations	Small-sized organizations	Micro organizations
Total number	53	17	22	8
Recruitment via printed newspapers (question 9)	3 (6%)	1 (6%)	1 (5%)	1 (13%)
Recruitment via third-party job  boards (question 10)	24 (45%)	10 (59%)	9 (41%)	3 (38%)
Recruitment via employers' own websites (question 11)	16 (30%)	5 (29%)	4 (18%)	1 (13%)
Recruitment via social media platforms (question 12)	3 (6%)	1 (6%)	1 (5%)	1 (13%)
Recruitment via traditional recruitment agencies (question 13)	19 (36%)	7 (41%)	4 (18%)	2 (25%)
Recruitment via employees' referrals (question 14)	19 (36%)	5 (29%)	6 (27%)	1 (13%)
Job applicant screening via social media platforms (question 15)	2 (4%)	0 (0%)	2 (9%)	1 (13%)

Table 2 indicates that big organizations rely more on their own websites as well as less on printed newspapers for their recruitment practices than that of organizations smaller in size.

Finding 15 (re: questions 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 and 15): A refined grouping of figures to study how company size affects organizational recruitment practices is presented in Table 3. [Note: only those who replied with “strongly rely on” are counted in Table 3.]

Table 3

	Senior management	Middle management	Junior management
Total number	15	46	29
Recruitment via printed newspapers (question 9)	0 (0%)	2 (4%)	2 (7%)
Recruitment via third-party job  boards (question 10)	9 (60%)	20 (43%)	12 (41%)
Recruitment via employers' own websites (question 11)	4 (27%)	12 (26%)	7 (24%)
Recruitment via social media platforms (question 12)	1 (7%)	2 (4%)	2 (7%)
Recruitment via traditional recruitment agencies (question 13)	3 (20%)	20 (43%)	7 (24%)
Recruitment via employees' referrals (question 14)	7 (47%)	11 (24%)	11 (38%)
Job applicant screening via social media platforms (question 15)	0 (0%)	2 (4%)	0 (0%)

Table 3 indicates that organizations slightly more in favor of using third-party job boards and employees’ referrals as methods for recruiting senior managers than managers in lower levels of an organizational hierarchy.

Finding 16 (re: survey questions 16, 17. 18. 19 and 20): A refined grouping of figures to study the job-seeking behavior of respondents with different job-seeking orientation is presented in Table 2. [Note: only those who replied with “strongly rely on” are counted in Table 4.]

Table 4

	Active job seekers	Passive job seekers	Not job seekers
Total number	40	43	11
Strongly rely on social media platforms for job seeking (question 16)	10 (25%)	3 (7%)	2 (18%)
Strongly rely on employers' websites for job seeking (question 17)	11 (28%)	2 (5%)	1 (9%)
Strongly rely on job boards for job seeking (question 18)	13 (33%)	5 (12%)	2 (18%)
Strongly rely on friends' referrals for job seeking (question 19)	8 (20%)	7 (16%)	1 (9%)

Table 4 indicates that active job seekers make more use of all the recruitment platforms for job seeking than others. Also, the job seeking behavior of passive job seekers and non job seekers do not differ much.

Overall, findings 1 to 16 give some basic information on the current e-recruitment practices by organizations and job-seekers in Hong Kong. However, they are still not capable to measure the co-relation among multiple variables in the survey data. For that, a brief multiple regression analysis has also been conducted on a number of variables as considered in the survey. The findings of such a statistical exercise using Excel’s regression function are presented in the next section.

A multiple regression analysis on the questionnaire survey data

Multiple regression analysis is a correlation analysis capable of dealing with more than one independent variable at the same time (Lind et al., 2001: chapter 14). Its objective is to “measure the strength of the relationship between the independent variables and the dependent variables” (Lind et al., 503). The technique has previously been employed by Ho (2015) to analyse Facebook-based survey data on the topic of homelessness. Here, a number of variables have been chosen from the survey data to come up with the following three multiple regression formulae:

Formula 1: organizational reliance on social recruiting

Organizational reliance on social media for recruitment (y1) = a +b1(x1: job position in organizational hierarchy) + b2 (x2: sector in an economy) + b3 (x3: organizational size) + b4 (x4: nationality of organization)

Formula 2: organizational reliance on job boards for recruitment

Organizational reliance on job boards for recruitment (y2) = a +b1(x1: job position in organizational hierarchy) + b2 (x2: sector in an economy) + b3 (x3: organizational size) + b4 (x4: nationality of organization)

Formula 3: organizational reliance on their own websites for recruitment

Organizational reliance on organizations’ own websites for recruitment (y3) = a +b1(x1: job position in organizational hierarchy) + b2 (x2: sector in an economy) + b3 (x3: organizational size) + b4 (x4: nationality of organization)

To conduct the multiple regression exercise, the survey responses are converted into scores as follows:

Organizational reliance on social media for recruitment (y1) (re: survey question 12):

Rely a lot:       3

Rely mildly:    2

Not rely:          1

Organizational reliance on job boards for recruitment (y2) (re: survey question 10):

Rely a lot:       3

Rely mildly:    2

Not rely:          1

Organizational reliance on their own websites for recruitment (y3) (re: survey question11):

Rely a lot:       3

Rely mildly:    2

Not rely:          1

Job position in organizational hierarchy (x1) (re: survey question 7):

Senior management:   3

Middle management: 2

Junior management:   1

Sector in an economy (x2) (re: survey question 4):

Public sector:  1

Private sector: 2

Organizational size (x3): (re: survey question 5):

Micro organization:                1

Small-sized organization:      2

Medium-sized organization:  3

Big organization:                    4

Nationality of organization (x4): (re: survey question 8)

Local organization:    1

Foreign organization: 2

Using the regression function of Excel, the following values are arrived at for the three formulae:

Formula 1: organizational reliance on social recruiting (re: Appendix 7):

Organizational reliance on social media for recruitment (y1) = 0.8189 -0.0511(x1: job position in organizational hierarchy) + 0.1629(x2: sector in an economy) + 0.0066 (x3: organizational size) + 0.1824(x4: nationality of organization)

Interpretation: The independent variables x2, x3, x4 have a slightly positive correlation with the dependent variable y1. For x2 (sector in an economy), the private sector has a slightly higher reliance on social media for recruitment than the public sector. For x4 (nationality of organization), foreign organizations have a slightly higher reliance on social media for recruitment than that of local organizations. X1 has a slightly negative correlation with y1, meaning that job vacancies for more senior position rely less on social media for recruitment. Since the p-values of all the independent variables are much larger than 5%, the null hypotheses that the b1, b2, b3 and b4 values be zero cannot be rejected.

Formula 2: organizational reliance on job boards for recruitment (re: Appendix 8):

Organizational reliance on job boards for recruitment (y2) = 1.9575 - 0.0459(x1: job position in organizational hierarchy) + 0.5153 (x2: sector in an economy) - 0.0474(x3: organizational size) - 0.1594 (x4: nationality of organization).

Interpretation: The independent variables of x1, x3 and x4 have a negative correlation with the dependent variable of y2. Their corresponding p-values are quite large. Thus, the null hypotheses that b1, b3 and b4 be zero cannot be rejected in this case. For variable x2 (sector in an economy), it has a positive correlation with y2 and its p-value is 0.0175 (which is smaller than 5%/2), implying that the null hypothesis of b2 being zero can be rejected when the critical value of 5%/2 is adopted for the hypothesis testing.

Formula 3: organizational reliance on organizations’ own websites for recruitment (re: Appendix 9):

Organizational reliance on organizations’ own website for recruitment (y3) = 1.5126 -0.0489(x1: job position in organizational hierarchy) + 0.1571 (x2: sector in an economy) + 0.2245 (x3: organizational size)  - 0.3309 (x4: nationality of organization)

Interpretation: The main thing to note is that the independent variables of job position in organizational hierarchy (x1) and nationality of organization (x4) have a slightly negative correlation with the dependent variable (y3). This means that (a) job vacancies for a more senior position (x1) rely less on organizations’ own websites to fill in and (b) foreign organizations (x4) rely less on organizations’ own websites for recruitment than local organizations do. Nevertheless, as all the p-values of x1 to 4 are larger than 5%/2, the null hypotheses that b1 to b4 be zero cannot be rejected.

On the whole, the multiple regression analysis is able to offer a clearer picture on the correlation among the variables covered in the survey than the analysis with tables (re: Tables 1 to 4). Nonetheless, given that very often the p-values of the independent values are large, the b values in the regression formulae are not quite reliable, That is, their values being zero cannot be rejected. On top of that, one has to also bear in mind that the survey captures primarily the respondents’ perceptions on the topics, thus subjective. In short, the survey findings provided here have relatively low validity as a piece of research work.

Concluding remarks

In view of the paucity of empirical statistics on e-recruitment practice in Hong Kong, the Facebook-based survey findings and the literature review from the writer should be of some academic and practical values to human resource researchers and practitioners as well as individual job seekers in Hong Kong. It is well understood that such findings do not have much external validity and it is also desirable to study the evolving topic e-recruitment with other research methods and with more theory-driven analysis. In this case, the paper might well be able to stimulate other researchers to conduct more e-recruitment research in the Hong Kong setting by treating the findings in this paper as hypotheses to be verified.

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44.  Wong, B. 2004. “Police seek online recruits” South China Morning Post March 23.

45.  Xpatjobs.com. (url address: https://hongkong.xpatjobs.com/).

Appendix

Appendix 1: LinkedIn makes suggestions of job vacancies to its member.

Appendix 2: LinkedIn invites its member to update his profile of skills.

Appendix 3: JobsDB provides functions to maintain a job-seeker’s record on profile and resume as well as to enable online application for jobs.

Appendix 4a: cpjobs.com sends a email to a job-seeker with a hyperlink to apply for a company’s job vacancy: the job advertisement.

Appendix 4b: cpjobs.com sends a email to a job-seeker with a hyperlink to apply for a company’s job vacancy: the job application form.

Appendix 5: an employer’s organization website (in this case, the Hong Kong Vocational Training Council) with job vacancy postings.

Appendix 6: the Facebook-based survey questions (20 questions) and responses statistics, from May 25 to 29, 2105.

Survey questions	Survey statistics
Question 1: What is your gender?	Male: 46 (44.66%) Female: 57 (55.34%) Standard deviation: 5.5 Responses: 103
Question 2: What is your age?	18 to 27: 2 (1.94%) 28 to 37: 43 (41.75%) 38 to 47: 47 (45.63%) 48 to 57: 11 (10.68%) 58 to 67: 0 (0%) 68 or above: 0 (0%) Standard deviation: 20.06 Responses: 103
Question 3: What is your education background?	Not yet a degree-holder: 20 (19.42%) Finished University Undergraduate Degree study: 59 (57.28%) Finished Master Degree study: 23 (22.33%) Finished Ph.D. Degree study (or equivalent): 1 (0.97%) Standard deviation: 20.97 Responses: 103
Question 4: What sector does your employer’s organization belong to?	Public sector: 18 (17.48%) Private sector: 81 (78.64%) NA: 4 (3.88%) Standard deviation: 33.49 Responses: 103

Question 11: Does your organization rely on its own website to recruit employees for vacancies of job similar to yours?	Yes, it relies on them a lot: 26 (25.24%) Yes, it mildly relies on them: 30 (29.13%) Basically, it does not rely on them: 37 (35.92%) Not applicable/ no idea: 10 (9.71%) Standard deviation: 9.91 Responses: 103
Question 12: Does your organization rely on social media platforms, e.g., Facebook and Linkedin to recruit employees for vacancies of job similar to yours?	Yes, it relies on them a lot: 6 (5.83%) Yes, it mildly relies on them: 11 (10.68%) Basically, it does not rely on them: 66 (64.08%) Not applicable/ no idea: 20 (19.42%) Standard deviation: 23.77 Responses: 103
Question 13: Does your organization rely on traditional recruitment agencies/ headhunters to recruit employees for vacancies of job similar to yours?	Yes, it relies on them a lot: 32 (31.37%) Yes, it mildly relies on them: 37 (36.27%) Basically, it does not rely on them: 25 (24.51%) Not applicable/ no idea: 8 (7.84%) Standard deviation: 10.97 Responses:102
Question 14: Does your organization rely on existing employees’ referrals to recruit employees for vacancies of job similar to yours?	Yes, it relies on them a lot: 31 (30.1%) Yes, it mildly relies on them: 42 (40.78%) Basically, it does not rely on them: 22 (21.36%) Not applicable/ no idea: 8 (7.77%) Standard deviation: 12.46 Responses: 103
Question 15: Does your organization rely on social media platforms, directly or indirectly, to do job applicants’ screening for vacancies of job similar to yours?	Yes, it relies on them a lot: 5 (4.9%) Yes, it mildly relies on them: 27 (26.47%) Basically, it does not rely on them: 47 (46.08%) Not applicable/ no idea: 23 (22.55%) Standard deviation: 14.92 Responses: 102
Question 16: Do you rely on social media platforms for your own job seeking purpose?	Yes, I rely on them a lot: 16 (15.53%) Yes, I mildly rely on them: 37 (35.92%) Basically, I do not rely on them: 41 (39.81%) Not applicable/ no idea: 9 (8.74%) Standard deviation: 13.55 Responses: 103
Question 17: Do you rely on potential employers’ organizational websites for your own job seeking purpose?	Yes, I rely on them a lot: 14 (13.86%) Yes, I mildly rely on them: 56 (55.45%) Basically, I do not rely on them: 25 (24.75%) Not applicable/ no idea: 6 (5.94%) Standard deviation: 18.99 Responses: 101
Question 18: Do you rely on job boards for your own job seeking purpose?	Yes, I rely on them a lot: 21 (20.39%) Yes, I mildly rely on them: 50 (48.54%) Basically, I do not rely on them: 23 (22.33%) Not applicable/ no idea: 9 (8.74%) Standard deviation: 14.99 Responses: 103

Question 19: Do you rely on friends’ referrals for your own job seeking purpose?	Yes, I rely on them a lot: 16 (15.53%) Yes, I mildly rely on them: 52 (50.49%) Basically, I do not rely on them: 31 (30.1%) Not applicable/ no idea: 4 (3.88%) Standard deviation: 17.92 Responses: 103
Question 20: How would you describe your job seeking behaviour?	An active job seeker: 40 (39.22%) A passive job seeker: 43 (42.16%) Not a job seeker at all: 11 (10.78%) Not applicable/ no idea/ it is complicated: 8 (7.84%) Standard deviation: 16.07 Responses:102

Appendix 7: multiple regression analysis for formula 1 (social recruiting).

SUMMARY OUTPUT
Regression Statistics
Multiple R	0.220411944
R Square	0.048581425
Adjusted R Square	-0.018184791
Standard Error	0.621986451
Observations	62
ANOVA
	df	SS	MS	F
Regression	4	1.125992063	0.28149802	0.727635
Residual	57	22.05142729	0.38686715
Total	61	23.17741935
	Coefficients	Standard Error	t Stat	P-value
Intercept	0.818865656	0.612480668	1.33696572	0.186545
Job position	-0.051104233	0.117918745	-0.4333852	0.666371
Sector in econ	0.16294904	0.204264674	0.79773481	0.428335
Org size	0.00660663	0.091750914	0.07200615	0.942849
Org  nationality	0.182458732	0.167615143	1.08855756	0.28093

Appendix 8: multiple regression analysis for formula 2 (job boards).

SUMMARY OUTPUT
Regression Statistics
Multiple R	0.350066814
R Square	0.122546774
Adjusted R Square	0.06097111
Standard Error	0.641222689
Observations	62
ANOVA
	df	SS	MS	F
Regression	4	3.273184816	0.8182962	1.99018191
Residual	57	23.4364926	0.4111665
Total	61	26.70967742
	Coefficients	Standard Error	t Stat	P-value
Intercept	1.957520978	0.63142292	3.1001741	0.003003788
Job position	-0.045894718	0.12156563	-0.37753	0.707181615
Sector in econ	0.515254042	0.210581989	2.4468097	0.017519378
Org size	-0.047377727	0.094588504	-0.500883	0.61838259
Org  nationality	-0.159370743	0.172798994	-0.92229	0.360264973

Appendix 9: multiple regression analysis for formula 3 (organizations’ own websites).

SUMMARY OUTPUT
Regression Statistics
Multiple R	0.289005217
R Square	0.083524015
Adjusted R Square	0.019209911
Standard Error	0.810484786
Observations	62
ANOVA
	df	SS	MS	F
Regression	4	3.412360178	0.85309	1.298688934
Residual	57	37.44247853	0.656886
Total	61	40.85483871
	Coefficients	Standard Error	t Stat	P-value
Intercept	1.51260006	0.798098194	1.895256	0.063133613
Job position	-0.048887682	0.153655033	-0.31817	0.751522432
Sector in econ	0.15710979	0.266168838	0.590264	0.557346896
Org size	0.224519002	0.119556817	1.877927	0.065510164
Org  nationality	-0.330859866	0.218412352	-1.51484	0.135338866

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[1] The social media platforms for social recruiting can be understood as a kind of platform business (The Center for Global Enterprise, 2015; Bonchek and Choudary, 2013).

[2] In Table 1, the figures in the cells are numbers of response, while the % figures are based on the total numbers in the first row of the table (Total number). Thus, for row 2 column 1, the % figure of 11%  is 2/18.

[3] According to the European Commission (2015), a micro company has fewer than 10 employees; a small company has fewer than 50 employees and, finally, a medium-sized company has fewer than 250 employees.