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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.
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.
They are biased against men because if they hire to many men they get hit with a discrimination lawsuit (of course, hiring all women would because perfectly fine in this feminized age) This is even true when the men are more qualified (and if equally qualified, I'd always choose a man over a younger woman because he won't miss time die to childbirth. Unless of course the woman is sexy and it's a position wherever that would benefit, like sales or bartender)
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
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)
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.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
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.
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.
Ideology: A tool used primarily to avoid the bother of thinking.
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.
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.