2.1 Online Recruitment
Generally speaking, there are two channels for the company to identify and attract the potential employee: formal and informal [42]. Formal channels refer to that there are other organizations and agencies involved in the process of connecting the employees and job-seekers, such as job fairs, ads in the newspapers, personnel consultancies, online links among government centers, education institutes and online human resources agencies. The informal channels indicate it is the personal recommendation from internal employers, friends, or relatives that facilitate the process of recruiters and potential employers.
Considering so various channels with respect of recruitment, the difference and the effectiveness of them have been a main issue in the study of human resources and could be measured and estimated in distinct ways [43]. While the company enjoyed the convenience and cost-effectiveness brought by the internet recruitment sites, 33% of European companies indicates the employers recruited through online websites are more liable to leave their jobs and 44% think that it not easy to find out the very good-fit employers with the internet tools [44]. On the other hand, the employers who entered the company with personal referral would significantly work longer and also tend to accept the job offer [45]. In this research, we try to improve the effectiveness of online recruitment by integrating the idea of informal referral into the online web sites.
2.2 Social Media
With the prevalence of mobile devises and social network platform, the involvement of social media has become daily routine for people around the world. Facebook, Youtube and Baidu are the second, third and the fifth most popular websites by Feb 2014. While the activities of social actions are unveiled, many applications have been developed, no matter in the form of web applications or app, and apply in distinct fields [46], such as online dating
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websites, knowledge transmission, finding experts [47], and fund-raising.
For the study of computer science, the vast population using the social media is an excellent opportunity to examine large-scale social theories. For example, Gilbert and Karahalios predict the tie strength and verify the completeness of dimension [48]. Choudhury, Counts and Horvitz focus on the changes of activities and emotions as to childbirth with social media interfering [49]. Burke and Kraut verify the premise that the strong ties offer better emotional support and the weak ties enable people to find a new job under the situation of unemployment [50]. Recently, there are lots of application about recruiting, as well as providing job information based on social network sharing, such as the popular business social network sites LinkedIn and Glassdoor, which has over 10 million users by 2012 [51].
The aim of this paper is to utilize the abundant data of individual’s social ties from the social media platform as well as the convenience and amount of users in order to generate a social referral application with the purpose of facilitating the job-hunting process.
2.3 Social Ties Analysis
Social network analysis has played a key role in modern research of sociology, which illustrates the connection between two individuals as “tie”. [33] Considering the concept of relationship, the intuitive notions of the “strength” of those ties would appear and thus could be calculated by different elements. Granovetter defines tie strength as a “combination of the amount of time, the emotional intensity, the intimacy (mutual confiding), and the reciprocal services which characterize the tie” [34]. Furthermore, he indicates there are two different social ties, which vary on the strength scores. The one is the “Strong Tie”, which usually occurs between trusted friends and families. The other is the “Weak Tie”, which often happens among acquaintances. [35]
Those ties impacts people’s daily lives in different ways. Reliable friends and close families can affect emotional health [36], help people suffer from stress [37], and often join
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together to lead the groups while facing the crisis [38]. Loose friends can help a friend inspire new ideas [39], a perfect place to launch the diffusion of information, or find a job through reference [40] [41]. In this research, we utilize the function and properties of weak ties as a perfect tool to locate a social referral for job-seekers.
2.4 Social Search
For decades, while the search engine generating from the concept of digital library project dominates the world of information retrieval [11], there are another ancient way to acquire knowledge-“the village diagram”. Compared with the latter web search only focuses on the individual’s seeking, the village way of query put more emphasizes on the
context-finding the right person to answer the question and also find the people connecting to those answers [12].
Actually, this kind of concept is widely used to optimize the results of searches, such as using collaborative social interactions [13] or social recommendation for collaborative filtering [14] by leveraging the data in the user’s social network. Since the social acts and social interactions could benefit the search process [15], this type of search can even be applied in the wall of decentralized search [16]. In this search model, how to route the queries over a social network becomes the main issues to break through [17], including considering the factors, such as how a specific node on that node responds or not, or how relevant this node is to the question we are searching for [18]. Although this paradigm of decentralized search, or so-called, peer-to-peer has been the main issue with regard to small-world related
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experiment a few years ago [19], they are all bounded by the limitation that the only source of interpersonal data collection could only be generated from the email system.[20][21]
Recently, besides the elaboration of application on the expert-finding area [22], social search has extended to various field, such as social discover ([23]), finding new web services ([24]), people search ([25]), and etc. In this study, we further use the concept of people search to find the reference candidates for our desired jobs.
2.5 Social Support and Appraisal
The provision of social appraisal can be regarded as one of the important features for social support, which is the combination of psychological and behavior functions. S.
Wasserman and K. Faust have proved that with more connections, whether in link of
friendship or interaction, it is more likely for people to influence to each other. [26] Actually, this kind of influence play an important role when talking about social support, which is defined as a mediating construct providing help from other people in the social network.[27]
With the help or support, or here we can say, the information from others in the social network could be offered as the source of social appraisal to help the decision making process.[28]
Recently, social appraisal has been widely used due to the popularity of social network analysis. For example, a lot of researches have been conducted in the field of electronic commerce, such as information filtering [29] and spreading [30]. Besides, the social appraisal
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is also used in knowledge management, such as expert-finding ([31] [32]). In this research, we use the social network relationship as the sources of social support to do the social appraisal for the evaluating how people are willing to help you and also how people could affect others.