The idea that Facebook and other social media sites can be used as a tool when hiring a new employee is not so surprising.
What is surprising are the results of a recent study published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology, where findings concluded a direct correlation between job success and the information a user publishes on their Facebook.
In the experiment, three “raters” (comprised of one university professor and two students) were provided the Facebook profiles of 56 college students with jobs.
“In five or 10 minutes, our raters could look at the tone of a subject’s wall post, note the number of friends they have, peruse their photos to see how social they were and assess their tastes in books and music. It’s a very rich source of information,†said Don Kluemper, the lead researcher and a professor of management at Northern Illinois University.
Raters generally gave favorable evaluations to students who had more friends, traveled, and showed a wide variety of hobbies and interests. Photographs of “partying†didn’t necessarily weigh in negatively, in fact raters perceived the student as extroverted and friendly.
The raters then answered a series of personality-related questions, such as “Is this person dependable?” and “How emotionally stable is this person?”
Six months later, the researchers matched these ratings with employee evaluations provided by each of the students’ supervisors. What they found was a strong correlation between job performance and the Facebook scores for traits such as conscientiousness, agreeability and intellectual curiosity.
Although the study did not examine the legality of using social media sites in the hiring process, these findings do raise questions about Facebook potentially being used as a reliable job-screening tool. The researchers caution that before recruiters use Facebook or other social media sites to assess a potential candidate, there are ethical and legal issues to consider, and employers could be opening themselves up to discrimination lawsuits.
The findings of this study are timely; applicants at police departments in North Carolina and Oklahoma, were asked to provide their Facebook passwords last year, according to a report in Human Resources Journal.
