Measuring personal branding in social media: a tool for visualizing influence

In today's rapidly changing online recruitment domain, there are certain job positions that favor (or may greatly benefit from) candidates that have built a strong personal brand, maintain an active social media profile, and a large network of contacts. Identifying the higher-ranking candidates in terms of their influence is a matter that depends on which parameters of social activity are considered more important by human resources experts for a given job position. This paper describes a tool for measuring personal branding in Facebook and visualizing the degree of candidates' social media influence. The tool offers flexibility to recruiters as it allows them to appropriately set the ranking criteria and via easily perceivable visualizations of comparison results, make more informed decisions about the candidate with the most suitable social activity. The tool can be used as a standalone application or be integrated into a company-oriented e-recruitment system to support the candidate pre-screening process.