Certain personality traits predict job performance — and those traits show up on your Facebook profile.
"What 'personality' speaks to is the underlying, difficult-to-name things that makes a person who they are," says Old Dominion University researcher Richard Landers, "and Facebook is a way to get to that question."
As Landers and his colleague Katelyn Cavanaugh find in a forthcoming paper, a thorough reading of a Facebook profile provides clues to how someone will behave on the job.
The personality traits that are most easily observed on Facebook and useful at work, they say, are conscientiousness and extroversion. Landers explained why:
- Conscientiousness refers to habits like being on time, doing complete work, or otherwise being organized and dutiful. Of any personality traits, this is the one that most commonly indicate job success. "Being on top of deadlines is almost universally a good thing," Landers says.
- Extroversion refers to how much a person enjoys spending time with large groups of people. This trait has more variance in regards to success: it's crucial for a salesperson, less important for a computer programmer.
Here's how Landers and Cavanaugh figured out how those traits surface on your Facebook.
They asked 146 participants to take an online personality test — reflecting on traits they thought they had. In addition, a group of observers rated them along personality traits, like agreeableness, neuroticism, conscientiousness, and extroversion.
Then both of those personality tests — one self-reported, the other observed — were compared against on the job performance.
Interestingly, studying people's Facebook profiles provided a stronger indication of success than asking them about their personality traits. Landers owes this to the fact that not everyone is great at identifying their personality in the context of a test, while a Facebook profile can provide years' worth of online behavior.
But this doesn't mean that a quick glance at a profile can give you deep insight into how someone will do at work.
"In order to have a really good picture of a person's personality from Facebook, you need to have a dozen or more people making judgments about the profile," Landers says, because everybody has their own interpretation about what constitutes extroversion or conscientiousness.
Instead, Landers said, if you're going to use social networks in hiring, make it a "formal system" where lots of people look at a profile and then compare notes. Combining those notes gives a better, richer understanding of a person's personality traits.
Of course, there are problems with making Facebook stalking part of the recruitment process.
As the Daily Dot reports, if a hiring manager found out about a candidate's sexual orientation or religious beliefs on Facebook and didn't make the hire as a result, the candidate could sue for discrimination. Plus, employers can't always get a handle on employees' profiles, especially since states such as California, Illinois, and Delaware have passed laws outlawing the practice of asking for employees' passwords.
