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Headhunters Can't Tell Anything From Facebook Profiles
New submitter sfcat writes "Companies, headhunters and recruiters increasingly are using social media sites like Facebook to evaluate potential employees. Most of this is due to a 2012 paper from Northern Illinois Univ. that claimed that employee performance could be effectively evaluated from their social media profiles. Now a series of papers from other institutions reveal exactly the opposite result. 'Recruiter ratings of Facebook profiles correlate essentially zero with job performance,' write the researchers, led by Chad H. Van Iddekinge of FSU (abstract). Not only did the research show the ineffectiveness of using social media in evaluating potential employees, it also showed a measurable biases of the recruiters against minorities (African-American and Latino) and against men in general."
So a profession with no psychology background can't successfully evaluate peoples' personal statements and associations as a proxy for their professional competence? They're failing to do what even actual psychologists struggle with?
Wow. Who'd have seen that coming.
I could have told you the biases off the top of my head. The anti-minority, anti-male headhunter is nothing new. Most headhunters are female and white, though several headhunter companies I have done business with are minority run and almost exclusively monochromatic (i.e. all black, all hispanic). They all have biases in general against men, BUT this seesaws to the other side as they are hiring for increasingly technical or executive positions as they rather play the odds that the person is hired and they get their commission.
Headhunting and HR both crack me up from an ethical standpoint. They are generally paid a notch higher at each position for similar work than others in the company, precisely because they discuss / are aware of pay levels throughout the company. Second, they are the biggest hen houses of racism, sexism, and gossip. In my experience they also have the highest consistency of just one or two "<insert race> <insert backup race> male" twofer/threefers to not seem like there is a problem.
Disclosure: The MSP I used to work at hosts some recruiting / temporary worker management applications.
Problems with using social media aside, headhunters are fucking lazy morons. I've never personally had to deal with them, thankfully, but one of my friends, being a consultant, does often and they are universally wastes of flesh. They are not concerned with trying to find the best candidate for the job, carefully vetting resumes and checking experience. Rather they are interested in finding someone as fast as possible and mating them with a job so they can get their fee. They rarely have the faintest idea of what they are talking about in terms of technical requirements and so on.
So ya, I'm sure this doesn't help. Particularly since what people put on their social networking sites varies a ton. Some people have lots of work related things, some have none. Doesn't really translate to job performance, just to what they like to share or not share.
Sounds like more what they are doing, particularly based on the discrimination report, is finding people they think "look good" meaning largely white and particularly good looking female, and sending them on.
And yet women always claim they are discriminated against. But discriminating against men is not only NOT sexist, but acceptable.
Fuck feminism.
Weather forecasters have the same chance of getting it right as you looking out of the window.
So what does it say about people who don't have a facebook profile? I'm guessing that we're scary dangerous people, who are terrorists and working to subvert the government. /sarc
Actually might not be far from the truth these days in the minds of some flappy headed nutbags.
Om, nomnomnom...
"bias against men"
I'd say more likely "bias fore women"
Giving a dollar to John Doe does not disadvantage the rest of the world, does it?
This article only reinforces the value of social media in evaluating future job performance in the human resources industry. I'll explain!
Since there is zero correlation, it is like reading tea leaves and a headhunter can reach any interpretation possible. Meanwhile, the zero correlation means any tea leaf reading cannot be falsified.
Arbitrary opinions and no valid way of measurement --- which makes the interpretations completely subject to whim! It is the perfect industry, possibly only surpassed by the "how to write a successful resume" sector of the economy!
With no right or wrong answers, what's not to LOVE!!!
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
So it took 18 months for someone to check their work? No surprise the soft sciences are achieving nothing.
But for 18 months, HR departments assumed they have a miracle cure. How long will it take for this 'tiger-repelling rock' to be thrown away?
Given a documented bias against men, what role does society have for men? Prison.
...no one is doing actual data analysis. From what I'm seeing in the story, recruiters are 'sort of getting a feel for' candidtes by looking at fb, twitter, and other social media pages, rather than using standardized analysis to do some variety of a Briggs-Meyer analysis of the candidates and compare those results with the requirements of the job posting they are looking to match the candidates up with. Granted I don't expect that any of the recruiters involved have even the slightest idea of how to match up profiles to requirements, but from the sounds of these 'Ratings' they are right up there with figuring out if someone who's sent you a FB friend invite is someone you want to have as a friend there.
You never know...
If headhunters can't employ some means to extract indicators of applicant abilities from FB, what does that say about the NSA's ability to get detailed profiling from FB? Also snakeoil?
Is it antisocial behavior to not have any FB account at all?
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
I have a profile on a business social network. I am a physicist (PHD) , and have worked a long time in science.
Everybody looking at my profile for longer than 20 seconds can figure that out.
I have a solid electronics/condensed matter/analog measurement background.
Everybody looking at my profile for longer than 40 seconds can figure that out.
But as it happens, i am a curious guy with diverse programming skills, which I have been using *from time to time*, but i know enough to talk to IT experts who really know what they are doing
Everybody looking at my profile for longer than 1 minute can figure that out.
So what i typically get/got is:
-we need a junior PHP programmer (yeah, sure - come on, admit you just searched for "PHP" and ignored the other skills, which you never heard about)
-do you like a job as *expert* for [Skill X, which was listed explicitely as "little experience"] (Oh, you like to sell anybody to you customer. At least you read my profile, but, thanks, no)
-in the interview (after beeing asked by the headhunter to apply): why do you apply here? (Yeah, because the company you hired to look for me "found" me - obviously they did not infrom you at all about the previous conversation.)
And what i see in the company i work for:
-I get a profile from our internal headhunters, whithout any infromation how that got onto my table.
-I should evaluate people for things of which i have no idea at all, but "it sounded similar" (to the HR intern)
-50% of hour HR seem to be interns. The HR has probably the highest rotation rate in the company; even the management has a felt half-life time of a year (sure, thats going to work out)
Your willingness to pry into people's personal lives for money is evidence that you are an embarrassment to humanity. Please hurt yourself.
isn't it like 52% of americans are female? i vaguely remember that statistic from the ads for the Man Show.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
I have no Facebook and with my unique name, google shows nothing except a few geology projects I've worked on. Geology isn't my field, though, just a hobby.
I gues it helps that I never work for corporations that are public. Always preferred to stay with small companies that don't worry about shareholder value.
No, it means you're hip and "in" with the youth culture.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Like anything else, social networking info is a possible source of useful info. As long as you understand the limitations.
I doubt that the average headhunter is good at evaluating much of anything, social networking or no. But that goes for the average {most professions} too ...
Everybody knows that the handshaking and the first impression at the start of a interview detemines 75% of the talk. Looking at the facebook first impression is equal. Any test would give better results.
My first instinct about the use of social media for job applicants has nothing to do with job performance, but feels more like a social background check -- is this person a "partier" or some kind of political "radical"?
My next thought is that maybe they use it as background for salary negotiations -- does this person have a big family/kids which would be expensive for insurance? Are they overextended financially and can be coerced into accepting a lower salary?
So far I have only met one, with a background in psychology, who could determine anything at all.
Most recruiters are completely clueless. They don't know _anything_. They know nothing about the world outside of their bubble. They have no idea what the company needs. They have no idea what the slave wants. They just randomly match and mix.
Now add to that that usually only the bad companies outsource hiring (at least in Germany) and you will get bad employees matched with bad employers.
I wouldn't want any countries defined by colour. As to why 'white' countries are richer and are therefore more attractive to economic migration have a look at the imperial past of Europe
I get contacted on linkedin a few times a month by recruiters. Half the time it is people who work for companies and actually want to talk to me. The other half it is third-party head-hunters, and what they want is for me to tell them anyone who may be interested: ie, they contact me, a stranger, and ask me to do their job for them. Of course, they usually offer a finder's fee of some sort, but if a recruiter/headhunter doesn't have his or her own bag of tricks, or even an hr professional subscription to LinkedIn, then what good is he/her?
As for recruiting internally, I have had to coach the recruiters at the company I work for as to what the look for, what type of candidate is acceptable for different departments, etc. I nearly have the company record on employee referrals, and now managers in other departments will often times come to me and ask if I know anyone rather than relying on "talent acquisition" to find them someone suitable. But hell, at $2500 a pop, its almost like a nice little part-time job, so they can keep being as useless as they want to be as far as I'm concerned. There's never going to be a substitute for a vouch from a trusted source, no matter what type of "screening" HR ever gets a hold of.
HR eiter in-company, or out-company (headhunter) loves to play God. Yes they manage payroll, taxes, paperwork, and even a little bit of personalities and do a stellar job. Who doesn't appreciate someone who minimizes potential beef with the IRS. When they play HR they do great, but when they pretend to read minds or futures, they do less well.
Consider engineers, for example. The HR folks are not engineers. They typically are afraid of equations, so algebra, calculus, and differential equations - prerequisites for engineering - are off the table. The only things left are to hope someone else who hasn't used their degree in 15 years (engineering managers) can tell the difference. (It is a good bet that if you haven't used Diff-Eq in 5 years, you aren't any good at it anymore.) HR can try to "hack it" using indirect indicators, GPA, keywords in the resume. As far as I have seen they can be somewhat easily bluffed by a pretty face of a good talker. The problem with that is that it puts folks who are pretty boys with good talk where it should put butt-kicking rock-stars who are going to change the world.
One of my favorite articles, for its lack of implementation or even serious consideration is the ignoble winner: "The Peter Principle revisited". http://arxiv.org/abs/0907.0455
This article gives a really basic, but extensible, framework against things like "frequency of review cycle" can be compared with actual ability to differentiate talent or maximize it in the organization. Use of the structure shows that there are organizational policies and structures that can actually reject talent. You can put in the 100% people, perfect talents, and the performance of the overall organization goes down. If you input some simple parameters you can determine that there is a peak after organizational performance goes down, and never returns to the peak.
This is a sandbox problem that could educate these folks because it gives them some great levers for getting to data-driven understanding.
If you're posting often on social media, you're probably not doing much in the way of anything called work.
I think that HR departments should be prevented from examining any social media for hiring but that said, I look at different people's facebook pages and I can tell if they are a complete tool, looser, go getter, nutcase, or criminal. When I am buying something through an online classified I will check that person's email for a FB match. It is great to get a picture of them to identify them at the coffeeshop etc. But many of these people have pictures of themselves infront of their weed stash, treating women like crap, holding guns(Odd in Canada) or just 100 pictures of themselves drinking like it's a sport.
Also their politics usually come clear through FB, I am not saying that you should hire based on politics but if people are putting up pictures that say Obama is going to make it illegal to be white and get a bank loan, or that Romney is going to make Mormonism the state religion; then they are a tool.
my facebook page is set to friends and family. I wonder how recruiters can view my page anyways.
and against men in general.
it's a fuggin women's world today. likely because HR is typically run by women.
There may be something to this "zero" business. I think Amazon's outsourced recruiters are the most useless idiots on the planet. They have some kind of LinkedIn search capability, and DO NOT EVEN BOTHER TO READ THE PROFILES OF THE PEOPLE THEY TROLL. They spam solely based on keywords, and troll me usually once every six months. They ignore my location, my skills, and everything else. They don't even look at my profile. They ignore my response, too, or else they wouldn't keep trolling me, since I tell them categorically I would never work for a company as unethical as Amazon. Surely that would be a clue that I'm not a good candidate? Apparently, the outsourcing service only hires brain-dead people with zero abilities or skills. These people are idiots even compared to other recruiters, which is saying something.
What amazes me is that a company as cheap as Amazon wastes money on these zeroes. Amazon would come out ahead if they just partnered with LinkedIn and spammed people themselves. They'd save a lot of money. I think Amazon's outsource service actually subtracts value from the recruiting process.
I do admire how LinkedIn milks money out of desperate recruiters. Great revenue source that apparently will never run dry as long as recruiters spend OPM to find candidates.
Maybe it's just Sturgeon's Law, but most recruiters couldn't get a clue in a clue sanctuary while doused in clue scent.
You could take a typical recruiter, drop them in the middle of Facebook HQ, and tell them to find some PHP experts, and they'd come back with a janitor, two administrators, and a high school kid who was visiting.
You could give them the resumes of the top people in the world, mixed with some from recent San Quentin parolees, and they'd do no better than chance at picking the good ones.
Facebook may or may not be a way to judge potential employees. But even if it were, most recruiters couldn't do it.
*I* don't. I capture them alive and put them outside.
I took inspiration from the pharma industry; better to sell insulin than a cure for diabetes.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
1) Back in the day when it was universities-only, "what happened on Facebook, stayed on Facebook". So students were candid on Facebook, making it useful to analyze their personalities.
2) Then Facebook opened up to the public, and (potential) employers could view (potential) employees' posts durung their university days. So many students used their privacy settings to hide the bad stuff, and were able to remain candid on Facebook.
3) Then (potential) employers started demanding Facebook passwords. People started sanitizing their Facebook pages, either manually, or with apps like Facewash http://lifehacker.com/5978872/facewash-makes-sure-your-facebook-profile-is-clean-and-interview+ready ( now renamed http://www.simplewa.sh/ )
A lot of Facebook pages are now glorified Linked-In clones sanitized for employer viewing, because people are scared of being fire/rejected-for-employment.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
With my private life but have a shit hemorrhage if I mix their business with my private life. Perhaps it is OK if I take the kids and pets to work now. Mother fucking piles of shit all of them.
This seems to be a common theme, but recruiters on LinkedIn, who have easy access to prefiltered data right from my own fingers, can't even manage to comprehend that.
My info: EE/CS, no interest in management, no interest in relocating from west coast.
Recruiter: Hey Sarusa, plz call me about this great ME (Mechanical Engineer) management opportunity in Madison, Wisconsin that just opened up.
I'm not making that one up. I wish I were. Ones that bad happen rarely, but weaker forms of that happen constantly.
Come to think of it, in my case it is. Antisocial with regard to the FB-crowd that I do not want to be associated with. Does that mean I cannot deal with younger colleagues? No, as long as they actually want to learn things and have some interest in their job, it will just work fine.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Speaking of HR, am I the only one that thinks HR should have nothing to do with the hiring of workers? HR is there to provide company information, set up 401k's, get appropriate documentation to/from workers, etc. Companies are still stupid enough to put the trust in what is usually a high school graduate in determining, e.g. which engineer to hire, which upper level manager to hire, which embedded system designer to hire, which surgeon to hire,... are you seeing my point? Even if they have a degree, it's not in the field you are hiring for. You are letting your company be run by a bunch of high school graduates. Are you still wondering why you can't make your quarterly profit estimates? Are you still wondering why all the people that are being hired aren't quite as good as they used to be? It's not because there are less truly qualified candidates out there. It because you will never get to see them until you have a qualified person/department that can truly find them for you. Yes Virginia, that means actually reading the resumes. It means having more than 3 interviews per job. "We can't afford that!", you exclaim. Again you are back to not getting the right people. If you don't get the right people you are going to fail. Tough times call for getting the right candidates to fill your positions. Not just holding on to dumb luck/resume filters/etc. to find them. If you truly want to make it, to make that quarterly/yearly profit estimate, HR can't be part of it, other than gathering and disseminating information to the potential hire.
of course you can't learn anything from a facebook profile especially since Facebook has become so ingrained its no longer useful as a respectable social network. That doesn't stop employers from trying to use it though.
Headhunters are pests. As soon as they start teaching negotiations classes in STEM degrees, recruiters will go the way of the rock'n'roll saxophone soloist. And good riddance.
with the first two words of the headline -- didn't need to read anything else.
you complain that people see "Java" on your resume, assume you're a web devoloper and then either contact you for jobs you are not suited for or fail to contact you for the ones that would suit you. This leads me to see the following problems that make you unfit for hiring in a high-unemployment market where employers can pick-and-choose:
1. You seem uninterested in jobs that might require you to stretch and learn other skills
2. You see some jobs as "beneath you", which is not a mindset employers want when they seek problem solvers
3. You seem too dumb to remove the Java stuff (which you claim is a problem) from your resume
4. You exhibit a truly annoying "poke my eye out with a blunt stick" (that would be a "downer" on any team) attitude when you hit a minor obstacle of your own making which you could easliy alleviate
Need I go on? You need to SERIUOSLY re-think things if you ever want things to look up
Anytime I see "Urgent need", "Excellent opportunity" or "Direct client" in a job listing e-mail especially out of my area, but even if it is in my area: I immediately ignore it and just hit delete.
Most of those are just copying/pasting a job listing from another job listing of the same type anyway, and likely don't actually have an actual job.
They can't tell, but can they tell that they can't tell?
I'd wager several pounds that the answer is "no". http://www.xenodochy.org/ex/quotes/knowsnot.html
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
...as a matter of policy is not a company I would ever care to work for, or even do business with. Employers need to stop being Big Brother, because they're appallingly awful at it.
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
"A recent paper by doccus on /. summarized that HR managers who based their hiring practices on unsupported studies that were soon countered tended to get fired far more quickly " ;-)
No, but having an FB account *may* be antisocial behavior.
These jackasses can't even seem to figure out what I do for a living from my LinkedIn profile. Keyword spamming asshats.
But doesn't this bias come from a majority male area - the courts. It's not like feminists have been lobbying the court system to get this outcome, it's one that's perpetuated (generally) by men against men.
Feminists aren't going to spend time fighting for your rights in this case because they have other issues to worry about, such as why the court/justice system is still so predominantely male.
Yes, there are plenty of examples of men being denied custody even though it's pretty clear the woman is causing damage. Don't blame that shit on feminists though.
FB captures users emotions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Plutchik-wheel.svg
Emotions vary depending on environment.
Casteism