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."

Comments

Color me shocked

[RobinEggs]

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.

Re:Color me shocked

[jareth-0205]

And if I were a recruiter, I'd probably consider having extensive profiles online a negative quality -- indicative of spending too much time posing and not enough actually working.

Yeah, those horrible employees that have evenings and weekends where they can do things other than working for you, how dare they.

Stick with the simplest, what people do in their own time is their own concern.

Re:Color me shocked

[Lumpy]

It is because it has experienced management in place. The companies that have fresh Grads from Business Management colleges are the ones that have the fools that think that your facebook profile is important.

The #1 problem with all companies in the past decade. Putting a snot nosed 20 somethings in a management position. I don't care if they have a PHD in something, they are stupid in regards to managing people. The ONLY way to learn how to manage people is by doing it and that takes time. Honestly Management age brackets should start at 35 years old as the YOUNGEST unless they prove themselves to be some kind of people management savant.

Otherwise you get these idiotic ideas that digging into your employees personal life has any relevancy to their work life. I have worked places where these idiots out of college tried to make everyone post something positive about he company daily on their Facebook/etc as a part of your employment. They claimed it was for "morale boosting". It was simply an attempt at free marketing.

Re:Color me shocked

[Nemyst]

Wait, so your solution to young managers not having experience is to delay them getting experience until they're older? How does that solve anything apart from pissing on young people?

Re:Color me shocked

[rochrist]

Well, yeah, and young officers are notoriously .....uneven...in their management capabilities, which is why we have noncommissioned who actually run things as long as the young officers are smart enough to rely on them. When they aren't, it's usually not very pretty.

Re: Color me shocked

[jareth-0205]

The only thing lamer than cultivating an extensive on-line social network is doing it during evenings and weekends instead of during working hours like 99.9% of social network enthusiasts.

I would assume that a potentially worthwhile employee is doing something a little more enriching and/or constructive during their free time.

Such judgement for a leisure activity! People have off-hours, people who work hard need off-hours even more. Some people read books, some watch cat videos, some poke around in other people's lives on Facebook. Again: judge people on the task that you want them to do for you, not what they choose to do outside of their interaction with you.

The snobbery on this site is so tiring.

Is anyone surprised?

[Sycraft-fu]

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.

Bias against men

[Anonymous Coward]

And yet women always claim they are discriminated against. But discriminating against men is not only NOT sexist, but acceptable.

Fuck feminism.

Re:Bias against men

[akozakie]

And this is modded funny? Controversial, agreed, but funny?

The dominating strain of feminism doesn't give a #$%# about equality and non-discrimination in general. It's one-way only, men be damned. Sure, there's a lot more discrimination against females in general, but in cases where it works the other way around you'd expect those who constantly babble about "equal rights" to side with discriminated men, at least verbally. Not a chance.

Example from my country: in a divorce as a man you have practically zero chance for the kids to stay with you, even if the mother is absolutely unfit to care for them. Worse, your visiting hours tend to be minimal. How many females will you find in the group fighting for fathers' rights? Guess. "We want equal rights" - yeah, sure...

Yeah, fuck this form of feminism.

Re:Bias against men

[mjm1231]

Sure, fuck this form of feminism... but where the hell is it dominating? I mean, outside of right wing talk show fantasy world? I have never run into an actual person who holds this belief.

The real world still does have a way to go to get to actual gender equality. That includes figuring out how to get there or what it even means. And it will need to go both ways. I would wager the majority of feminists would agree with that.

Re:Biases

[DarkOx]

I don't think anyone is suggesting HR is not necessary but to continue your analogy:
If the the HR / recruiting firm pairing at some places I have worked was a firewall/IPS pair it would:

Have an insanely high false negative rate frequently forwarding malicious traffic with will known signatures

Drop large amounts of legitimate traffic to important assets like the web farm, with log events of "just because, or I don't remember why".

Forward traffic originally destine for other unused address to live hosts without any filtering to meet some minimum number of resumes^H^H^H^H connections setups.

Interpret it policy rules on a per connection basis, frequently with different and non-deterministic results and log nothing.

Re:So what does it say...

[tftp]

How can you know that the "investigation" they do into your facebook profile is actually on the right person?

Does that matter to HR? They have no engineering deadlines to meet, and no products to deliver to the customer. In a large company (where HR is most likely to be a significant group) HR would be well insulated from financial results of the business. Nobody is going to double-check resumes that they threw away.

Re: My own experience.

[PenguinOnCowboy]

Jack of all trades is not the way to find a job. Companies are looking to fill a specific position. Craft a resume high lighting each of your specialities.