Assessing e-Recruiting on Social Media: FBI Case Study

Ian McCulloh, Nathan Ellis, Onur Savas, Paul Rodrigues

Abstract: With the rise in popularity of social media, these platforms present a new opportunity to reach potential job candidates for employment opportunities. The current literature lacks sufficient research on methods and best practices to design and assess the efficacy of recruit and hire campaigns delivered on social media. We present a case study of a government e-recruiting effort discovered on Twitter. We collected almost 20 thousand tweets using the hashtag #FBIJobs, this included both Tweets and Retweets. Applications of descriptive statistics, topic modeling, sentiment analysis, and graph analytics identify where the campaign may miss potentially interested job candidates. We also find evidence of “popularity transfer” where co-mentions appear to increase the visibility of an accounts content in public feeds, without transferring the sentiment surrounding the more popular account. The research and findings were based on a publicly available e-recruiting campaign found online, without any inside knowledge or influence on campaign design or execution. Recommendations to better focus e-recruiting campaigns are provided.