Exploring the Perceptions of Postgraduate Students Using Social Media when Seeking Employment

Social media has rapidly increased in popularity, and its growth has influenced business operations and methods of communication, including how organisations review and implement their recruitment strategies. Recruitment is an integral activity to the organisational function of human resource management. Traditional methods of this activity have evolved whereby organisations focus on using social media as a recruitment method.

Based on Six Degrees of Separation and Resource-based View theories, this paper aimed to investigate postgraduate students' perceptions of using social media when seeking employment. A quantitative research methodology was adopted, and a hundred and forty respondents participated in this study by completing questionnaires. Findings indicated that ninety-five percent of Honours students have professional social media accounts. The most salient finding was that over seventy percent of the respondents indicated using social media for job seeking, with LinkedIn and Facebook being the most favoured. This study found that social media is a popular tool many individuals and organisations use. It is recommended that further research under this context is undertaken with a broader demographic of postgraduate students, especially as they are a large segment of job seekers.