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

[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.

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.

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.