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

[Anonymous Coward]

Any employer basing its decision to hire me based on social network profiles is not an employer I'd like to have. I don't have a FB profile and I don't see a reason to start now. My current employer seems to agree. During the interview I was honest and upfront about it, even though they didn't ask I told them straight away "I know companies these days scour prospective emplyee social network profiles, but the thing is I'm not on FB, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, tumblr, whatever-it-is-the-site-of-the-day". Their responsa was "We have no interest in your private life".

I do have a profile on Linkedin, which I update regularly, though. And by regularly I mean probably once a month, or so. The only other remotely social networking I do is flickr. I do have an account, which I use to share photos and discuss photography with other enthusiasts like myself.

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

[KernelMuncher]

I've got to disagree about your belief that young people can not be effective managers. The military routinely turns young college graduates into officers and gives them leadership responsibilities. That system has been successful in the United States for more than two hundred years.

The main difference between the military and the private sector is in the preparation. The military has a specialized training program (OCS) specifically tailored for leadership principles that all applicants must pass before becoming officers. That lasts for several months. And, for young officers, there's a great support system of experienced officers and NCO's who can give them advice.

Private corporations generally don't offer training and mentorship programs any more due to cost cutting measures. It's common to have people promoted to management positions with no training whatsoever. And the closest civilian equivalent, an MBA, seems to breed arrogance.

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.

Wrong!

[TrollstonButterbeans]

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!!!

My own experience.

[drolli]

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)

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: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.