My name is Alexandra Krska and I am a Senior from the Walton College of Business studying Supply Chain Management and Marketing.

Over the past year I have been researching with Dr. Meline Schaffer, a Management professor within the Walton College of Business. About the potential impacts social media has on the recruitment and selection processes. Living in NorthWest Arkansas brings a lot of visibility to the high demand of employees in the workforce, but also the competitiveness of securing one of those opportunities. Since you were young, you were most likely told to “watch what you post” on social media and networking sites because a future employer might look at it… but is this true? Should everything I post be following the rules of professionalism or is this just a scare tactic?

In this research I aim to determine the actual usage of social media in recruitment and selection processes. This research can be used for businesses to set procedures and guidelines of future processes to ensure biases are not being made and selection is based on workforce necessities and not unnecessary characteristics such as attractiveness.

Dr. Meline Schaffer teaches subjects such as Managing People and Organizations, and Ethics and Corporate Responsibility. The idea for this thesis project actually came from taking one of her classes, managing people and Organizations, in which we spoke about some employer biases and the process of recruiting. Because of this and the fact that her industry experience proves relevant to my overall question, she has been very knowledgeable and a great resource for my research.

This past semester was aimed at distributing the survey to ensure that my data was collected in an even, but overarching way. The survey aims to investigate experiences from both industry professionals/recruiters, and job applicants/students. Because of this, I had to find a way to distribute my survey evenly to both demographics in order to receive results that are applicable and unbiased. To do this I have been distributing my survey to past employers and co-workers as well as sending it to fellow students. Dr. Schaffer was very understanding of the way that surveys are distributed in corporate America, so I knew what I was up against and how to receive the most data possible. Although the survey was supposed to close around late February in hopes to receive more sustainable results, we made the decision to leave the survey live until the end of the semester.

A very overarching problem that I had to overcome was the turnout of the survey. I knew going into this research that it would be my biggest problem and drawback, but I did not think of how far it would push my research back. I learned that mass distributing the survey through group

chats or large email distribution lists would not work, so I took to individually sending the survey to people I knew and connections to make a more intentional distribution. However, this itself was very time consuming. In the end, I am set to close the survey on the last day of the Spring semester and start the analysis over the summer.