What Employers Can Learn About You From Facebook

In a prior post, I have discussed how inappropriate pictures posted on Facebook could support an employee's dismissal. However, a positive Facebook profile may help you get hired in the first place. A study published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology indicates that reveiwing the social media profiles of a prospective employee may allow employers to closely approximate the results of standard personality testing. The study also indicates that information from social networking sites may be a better predictor of job success than IQ tests.   A similar study by University of Maryland Assistant Professor Jennifer Golbeck revealed similar results. According to Professor Golbeck:

There’s a lot of research out there that’s of interest to employers and businesses, about what a person’s personality says about their potential for job success and their ability to work in a team, and a lot of companies make people take personality tests. If we can get pretty accurate results just by looking at someone’s social media profile, then you have the potential to apply all those results about what personality implies about a person, without actually having to have them take a test. So there’s some good sides to that, and some potentially creepy sides. I’m not a legal expert, and I don’t know the details of that, but employers are certainly looking at all the social media that’s available about their potential employees, and people really need to keep that in mind.

Of course, the results of the review may not always be beneficial to the applicant. But this study gives us another example of the way that technology and social media stretches traditional notions of privacy.

Click here or on the image below to see a report discussing the value of personality tests in hiring:

Facebook Photo Facilitates Firing

Despite the best efforts of faculty, career centers, news media, parents and peers to educate college students about the ramifications of internet postings and images, students still seem to be surprised to learn that there are real life repercussions to their social networking behavior. Specifically, when your boss sees the drunken, inappropriate, embarrassing, photo of you that your friend uploaded to his facebook page, don't be surprised if you are asked to clean out your desk and are escorted out of the building by security. And those images may show up in internet searches for decades - affecting all your future job searches as well. There is an international legal debate going on over the "right to be forgotten."  Can search engine companies be ordered to prevent access to older posts in order to allow records of youthful indiscretion to fade?  I think that is a difficult argument to win.