The Risk of Using Social Media for Hiring

Social media can be a very useful tool for employers in the hiring process. It provides much information that is unavailable through other hiring processes. However, firms have to be very careful about how they gather this information. There are many pitfalls that must be avoided, particularly discrimination charges. When employers access social media sites, they have access to lots of protected information they may not be able to get otherwise, such as religion, political views, and disabilities. Firms have to be careful to avoid using this information to disqualify candidates or make important hiring decisions. Also, firms must consider the timing in which they access social media sites. It is often more acceptable to look up candidates on Facebook or LinkedIn after you have had a face-to-face interview with them. One more issue with using social media is that some personal information you need explicit permission from a candidate to gain access to, such as when an employer does a credit check before hiring someone.

Another drawback of using social media for recruiting is that the candidate pool is not representative of the U.S. population. Studies have found that the percentage of Latinos and African Americans who use popular sites, such as Facebook and LinkedIn, is much lower than the actual proportion of these ethnicities in America. In order to reach these candidates companies must turn to other form of recruitment, such as magazines and website ads. They should also clearly display the fact that they are equal opportunity employers and are looking for diverse applicants on their websites.

So how do you feel about using social media in hiring? If you were running your own company would you employ this practice? Do the risks outweigh the benefits? And what are some ways you think companies could help protect themselves against lawsuits and build good policies on social media?

http://www.shrm.org/hrdisciplines/technology/articles/pages/be-smart-when-using-social-media-for-hiring.aspx

Where IT Impacts

Where IT Impacts

I strongly believe that technology will not replace humans in the work force although it will change employment and the workplace. With that said, I strongly agree with David Autor and David Dorn’s content in their article “How Technology Wrecks the Middle Class.” They did a splendid job with observing the impacts of IT. 

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/24/how-technology-wrecks-the-middle-class/?_r=0

They touched on how technology saves many companies from hiring labor; however, at the same time technology is displacing many labor workers. Although these advanced machines are adopted to increase production, they still need workers to handle them so our labor workers become operators. However, it doesn’t take a whole team on the assembly line to monitor one machine so not everyone gets the job as an operator.

Information technology replaces a lot of the manual processes and production processes like organizing, sorting, and retrieving which leaves us with the “non-routine” jobs. These non-routine jobs are usually saved for the higher level employees like the managers, professionals, and technical people. The authors remind us how these people are the people with higher levels of education needed to analyze the data computed from IT. The article states how only 40% of Americans enroll in a four-year college after high school and more than 30% of those students don’t even graduate with a degree.

Overall, IT is not replacing jobs but how jobs are being performed by workers. The highly educated workers are benefitting most from the technological advances. Some labor jobs such as truck drivers and cooks are not necessarily threatened by IT. It is really the middle class jobs that are having a hard time with the rise of IT.

The authors and I agree that the best way to respond to the impacts of IT is to continue our education. Nowadays employers don’t want to provide training but are looking for trained and knowledgeable workers.  Even if you don’t want an IT job, many, if not all, companies do work with some kind of IT system so it doesn’t hurt to prepare yourself. If you are still waiting for the best time to invest in building your IT foundation, don’t you think the time is now?

The Difference IT Makes

The Difference IT Makes

Being a business student and hearing about how efficient and cost-effective technology is for businesses and organizations, I’m like... MUST have the SECRET FORMULA (*IT Knowledge)!

 http://karen-plankton.tumblr.com/

I feel like IT is similar to a second language. The second language doesn't replace your native language but instead it drastically increases your opportunities. Thus, being well-versed in IT just enhances and builds your skills and abilities making you a better asset to the company or improves your employment prospects.

Now the desire to learn is there...so how does technology specifically save on costs and improve systems?

http://is.unl.edu/pma/about-it-cost-reducing-task-force

Here is an example of how informational technology benefits its users. In the linked article below, the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI) discusses specifically how unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) save time, money and lives.

http://epic.org/events/UAS-Uses-Saving-Time-Saving-Money-Saving-Lives.pdf

According to this article, unmanned aircraft systems enhance public safety, aid in the recovery of disasters, protect the environment, enable scientific research, and boost agricultural production. AUVSI gives the example of how fire departments use UAS to detect hot spots and provide awareness of the situation. By obtaining this information more quickly, fire fighters can work and deal with fire faster and more efficiently with a clearer view of the whole situation. In 2012, 33% of firefighter deaths by nature of injury occurred on fire ground. (Source: http://www.nfpa.org/~/media/Files/Research/ NFPA%20reports/Fire%20service%20statistics/osfff.pdf). Imagine how UAS can reduce the death rate of our responders! Not only is it less risky, it is also cheaper to use unmanned aircraft system with direct operational cost of $3.36 per hour than to use a manned aircraft at a cost of $250-600 per hour. Wow!

UAS are also practical in other hazardous situations like nuclear power plant leaks and volcano eruptions. UAS can detect stranded people faster than emergency responders and can also capture data for research, rescue, and planning purposes.  These systems can help us reduce the risk of losing our talented people and expensive equipment when conducting research and working in these dangerous environments.

Overall, UAS prevent calamities by providing us with more accurate data to make predictions and preparations and help us recuperate more quickly from misfortunes.

After reading about UAS, doesn’t it make you think of all the different ways you can improve systems with IT? It makes me imagine scenarios like how IT or Information Systems can benefit a growing business with traditional filing system, a large corporation with potential cost reductions, or an organization that follows trends and needs real-time information. It’s amazing how much technology can provide...saves on time and money, improves business processes, boosts economy, and the list continues!

Is Technology Destroying Jobs?

Please read up until the “New Economy?” section of the following link:

http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/515926/how-technology-is-destroying-jobs/

Rotman seems to think that we are not able to keep up with the ever-growing field of technology and that because of this we have fallen prey to a reduction in the demand for many different types of human workers. I think that we are losing a lot of jobs to the new technology, but not quite to the extent that Rotman sees it. We created the technology knowing what it had the capabilities of doing and most companies have implemented it because it is, in the long run, cheaper and more efficient.

While the new technology may be destroying certain areas of jobs, it is also creating some as well; although, they may be higher level jobs than those being destroyed (for example some created would be those who are actually developing the technology and some destroyed would be factory workers). While he does show a significant amount of evidence, I do not think that technology is as detrimental as it is made out to be in Rotman’s article. 

Later on  in the article, Rotman mentions some of the different types of robots that are used in different types of work settings. Two of the robots mentioned, Baxter (left) and Kiva (right), are simply meant to do the work that no one else wants to do. Their purpose ranges from retrieving things from a large warehouse setting to smaller, repetitive work. This is a prime example of how new technology is being used to not necessarily take the place of human workers, but to help them and make their jobs easier.

     

Are there any other reasons behind the fact that new technology is taking the place of many human workers? Also, do you think that technology is growing at a faster rate than we are able to keep up with?

http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/515926/how-technology-is-destroying-jobs/
http://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/industrial-robots/rethink-robotics-baxter-robot-factory-worker
http://teachthe4ps.com/place/kivas-robot-army-helps-run-warehouses/

Why IT is Awesome

There are two things I've found to be really difficult as a college student. The first thing is somehow staying motivated and energized in all of my classes, especially when things start getting crazy towards the middle and end of the semester. It seems like of all of my teachers get together and purposely have every test for each of my classes scheduled on the same day every semester. To help you understand what I mean, this meme should explain things:

(source: imgur.com/8pOpe)

The second thing I've found really difficult is somehow engaging the other students whenever giving a presentation. A lot of the other students probably have a thousand things on their minds too, so getting their attention isn't exactly easy. And right now, I'm running into that difficulty again. How do you make a topic like the economic and employment impact of information technology interesting? Well, I ran into this nugget of info about the jobs IT creates. It seems pretty relevant:

- In 2011, IT workers earned $78,584 a year, 74 percent more than the

average worker ($45,230).

The source of that info is an article called "Just the Facts: The Economic Benefits of Information and Communications Technology" by Robert D. Atkinson and Luke A. Stewart. It can be found here: http://www2.itif.org/2013-tech-economy-memo.pdf. It mentions some other interesting things too, and I'll get to a few of those soon.

So when I hear about the average worker in a field earning $78,584 a year, I start to think about what job I'm going to get after graduating. Then I think that I'll be making that kind of money in that job. Then I start to feel like this:

(source: bretcontreras.com)

Then I come back to reality and realize I'll probably feel like this after graduation:

(Source: njscpa.org)

So anyway, it's at least nice to know those jobs are available. That article I cited earlier mentions that there are quite a few of those jobs out there and they are still being created. Here are a couple of points it brings up:

- Between 2001 and 2011, over 565,000 IT-related jobs were created (in all industries) in the U.S., an increase of 22.2 percent. IT jobs grew more than 95 times faster than employment as a whole, which grew by only 0.2 percent.

- Increased investments in IT actually lead to more, not less, job creation. U.S. corporations that invested more in IT expanded their workforces by 14 percent between 2006 and 2010, while the average increase of Fortune 500 firms that invested less in IT increased employment just 6 percent.

Reading stuff like this makes me a bit more hopeful about whatever job or career I may find myself in after graduation. Even if I don't work directly in IT, it's good to see jobs are actually being created so I don't have to compete relentlessly for, what in all likelihood will be, an entry level position. 

It's also nice to think that one day I'll be paid for doing work, as opposed to paying someone else to do work like I'm doing right now in college. Seriously, has anyone else thought about that before?