svenullern

It makes a few years that Social Network Services (SNS) are involved in our daily life. We share content, keep in touch with our friends and family members and build communities around common interests with total strangers. From Myspace, to Facebook and Twitter, people login on SNS every day to take an infinite amount of actions. Facebook alone records 1.86 billion monthly active users! The heavy use of those SNS engendered many different risks. Today hackers use the easy access to information to commit fraud, identity theft and many malicious actions; those causes both users and potential users to question the level of security and privacy that SNS offers and impacts their level of trust toward those platforms.

Today, it is important for SNS to understand what pushes consumers to adopt or not their services. User’s concerns may inhibit the growth of those platforms and this why Dong-Hee Shin examined users’ perception of security, trust, and privacy concerns regarding social networking platforms and intended to elaborate an SNS acceptance model based on those factors.

After conducting an intensive literature review about technology adoption and its relevant concepts, Dong-Hee Shin created a trust-based decision-making model and tested the model by collecting data from SNS users and running a structural-equation modeling process on those data.

Beforehand, Dong-Hee Shin conducted some pre-survey interviews in order to,

(1) cross-validate factors identified from the literature;

(2) learn about context-specific factors;

(3) to guide the survey question design.

From the results of those pre-survey interviews, an actual survey was created and sent to a survey agency which gathered responses from 370 participants. The answers of this survey were then used to test the model fit. Eight common model-fit measures were used to estimate the measurement model fit and results confirmed that the anticipated theoretical model explains and predicts user acceptance of SNS substantially well.

The results demonstrated the importance of perceived security and perceived privacy when influencing users’ intentions to use SNS. The effect of trust on attitude was also supported by the results, implying that privacy mediates the relation of security on trust. 66% of the variance in trust is explained by users perceived privacy and perceived security. Trust, combined with security and privacy, explain 51% of the variance in attitude toward behavior, which subsequently explain 23% of the variance of intention.

As the paper suggests, SNS managers can learn a lot from those findings. First of all, managers need to become more and more customer centric, focusing on their trust relationship with customers through the initiation and the promotion of comprehensive privacy standards. Furthermore, SNS should make sure that the offered level of security of their services is aligned to the one that consumers expects as security affects behavioral intention through attitude. Moreover, explicit policies and data protection mechanisms are needed so that users can experience a similar level of social privacy as the one they find offline.

Overall, SNS managers needs a full understanding of the security and privacy factors that influences users’ acceptance of their networks. Only this understanding will promise a bright future to their platforms which matures in such hostile environment.

Sources:

Shin, D. (2010). The effects of trust, security and privacy in social networking: A security-based approach to understand the pattern of adoption. Interacting with Computers, 22(5), pp.428-438.

Have you ever applied to a certain position for job or an internship and felt like the recruitment process was exhausting? That it takes weeks to receive any response either positive or negative; and that when the later happens no real reason was given to you? If you did experience this kind of situation, you may ask yourself, why is this so often the case?

Well, the problem predominantly comes from companies’ recruiting practices. According to theLadders a recruiter will merely spend more than 6 seconds reading through a candidate’s resume. While BeHiring found out that a cover letter has only 17% of chance of being read, and most recruiters do not even bother replying to candidates.

Overall, an inefficient and unfair system has been going on for decades which is based on two documents which use is outdated. Moreover, this lengthy process is very expensive to companies who spends a lot of resources on those recruitments.

Those are the reasons why the online SaaS platform Scoringline was founded. Scoringline is an innovative and collaborative tool which value proposition is to ultimately allows companies to capture the most skilled candidates out of a large pool of applicants. It promises companies an endless to save time on both reading resumes and sorting CVs while allowing them to offer a better experience to their candidates.

How do companies benefit?

(Automatic qualification) – CV-sorting is replaced by an automatic score
(Confirm skill sets) – Prescreening phone calls are replaced by role playing simulation
(Save time) – The best candidates are invited to follow up interviews, recruiters save up to 50% of their time as it only takes a few clicks to send an answer to all candidates regarding their applications
(Enhance employer brand) – The employer’s brand is enhanced by using an innovative hiring process
(Candidates profile expanded) – The company’s pool of candidates naturally grows by including people that may not have the usual profile but do have the skills necessary to perform in the position

How do applicants benefit?

(Outstanding experience) – Companies can forget about the long ATS’ forms and only ask relevant questions to applicants
(Let candidates express themselves) – It gives an opportunity to reveal applicants’ skills and motivation
(Equity) – The process is fair as every application is treated similarly – Guaranteeing equal opportunities

How do Scoringline benefit?

Scoringline business model consist of two different offers.

The first one consist of offering a monthly subscription that allows clients to use the platform in their recruitment process. While the second offer consist of selling a HR service where Scoringline’s take care of finding the right candidate for a company who decided to outsource its HR capabilities.

Value Co-creation

Companies using the new online recruitment processes will be able to enjoy network value creation: as more and more job seekers apply through the platform, companies will gradually have a larger database of candidate profiles as all applications are saved, and rejected applicants could still be called back at later stages, saving great time in the process. Furthermore, different departments of a multinational company may decide to share their pool of candidates.

On the other hand, as it performs its recruiting service, Scoringline saves the profiles of all candidates who applied to one of their client’s position. This allow Scoringline to enjoy an ever-growing pool of candidate within which it may find the right profile for its clients.

In either case, the value of this network grows with time as more profiles enter the database, promising a sustainable future to it.

Efficiency Criteria

Scoringline business model is adapted to most political, social or legal regulations of the countries in which it operates. It promotes the transparency of company’s recruiting processes, supports equal opportunities and revolutionize candidates’ experience which are now able to fully express themselves and to not be left without any update about where does their application stands.

Sources: