You might have heard of a new trend going on for the past few years where recruitment departments for large companies check Facebook and Twitter for profiles of their new applicants.
A technology market survey taken in 2012 by Eurocom Worldwide, a Public Relations and Communications agency, says, “Almost one in five technology industry executives say that a candidate’s social media profile has caused them not to hire that person.”
Predicting Personality with Social Media, a paper published by the website of the University of Maryland, investigated how much social media might give away about personality.
The potential for social media to affect careers is ever-growing.
You’ve gone and taken down your Facebook photos from Saturday night and that one weekend in Mexico and you’ve deleted any scandalous tweets you had, but is that all you need to worry about? Recent studies suggest otherwise.
Written in 2010, Predicting Personality with Social Media says that they “can predict personality to within just over 10 percent” or more precisely, within an 11 percent margin. That degree of error isn’t even significant when determining the five major parts of personality more commonly known as the Big Five Personality Inventory. The study adds “the difference between being 65 percent and 75 percent extraverted… is likely small enough that the error would not have many practical implications.”
What this means is that they may not know your exact percentages but they can get a firm general idea of your overall personality just based on your social media profile. They split the profile into six parts but one part alone, language use, gave them 52 percent of a user’s personality. Based off of just status updates, your About Me section, and other things such as tweets, you can get an idea of how someone behaves.
The findings correlated certain qualities, like amount of Facebook friends, to the Big Five personality traits like Extroversion. More books in a user’s favorite book’s list was linked towards a higher rating of Openness.
People with higher Conscientiousness were scored with less posting information about things and more about posts with people and social activities.
Agreeableness was determined by words that describe emotions and positive emotion words.
If employers put your social media to the test, how would you score?
Nick Felts
Staff Writer