LinkedIn as the upcoming recruitment tool and top management, graduates and student’s exposure to LinkedIn in Bangladesh

Abstract

Bangladesh is a developing country with immense potential. With the changing world economy, Bangladesh is also pushing it’s boundary and moving forward in order to go beyond. In the process of doing so, the commercial organizations of the country need to demonstrate their existence and capability in a manner that work as branding for the organization. Thus, the top management’s information needs to be available to all the stakeholders. In the digital era of communication, the best method to know about someone or something is Internet. The reason for this is simple, it is the most available and affordable mean of communication and information sourcing. Thus, the topic titled ‘LinkedIn as the Upcoming Recruitment Tool and Top Management, Graduates and Student’s Exposure to LinkedIn in Bangladesh’ is brought forward. In this report, a thorough analysis regarding the potential of LinkedIn as a recruitment tool was done. Moreover, a research using primary data was done to gain insight of the students, graduates and recent job holders’ perception in this matter. For doing so, a survey was done in BRAC Business School (BBS). BBS was chosen as a sample as time and resource to survey the whole population (all the students, graduates and recent job holders) was not available. Furthermore, a research was conducted using secondary data to find out Top Management’s Exposure to the LinkedIn. For doing the research, a database was created consisting of the names, designations, contact information, LinkedIn account link of the organizations enlisted in Dhaka Stock Exchange. DSE was chosen as a sample as information about the whole population (all the existing companies’ top management’s information of Bangladesh) was unavailable and time constraining to collect. After gathering the required information, Microsoft Excel software was used to find out the outcome of the research. In the outcome, it has been found that, LinkedIn is still not a viable tool to carry out recruitment process alone. Along with this foremost outcome, several problems were also identified. It has been seen that most of the organizations in industries which are more exposed to the developed world, their top management are more or less active users of LinkedIn. Moreover, among the top management post holders, the individuals from background of foreign studies, job experience are heavy users of LinkedIn compared to their counterparts. Furthermore, among the female top management post holders, heavy user of LinkedIn are most common. In the recommendation part of this report, it has been suggested that, Company Page are to be properly created and maintained in a regular basis, talent pipeline is to be created and updated to store necessary information about the potential candidates, while posting jobs in LinkedIn necessary precautions are to be thought of to maximize it’s impact on the minds of potential candidates, gathering knowledge and awareness about LinkedIn is a must to utilize this tool to it’s full potential and finally continuous effort is to be given towards building network and maintaining communication. To sum up it can be said that although LinkedIn is a very powerful recruitment tool in many developed countries; the infrastructure, management techniques, process of communicating and exposure to internet in Bangladesh is adverse in terms of using LinkedIn as a recruitment tool alone. However, it is without a doubt a very good auxiliary tool in this regard.