The interview is dead: Facebook used to predict job performance

We know that employers have been screening candidates on social networks for a while now, seeing what kind of people they really are outside the interview room. But now, far more than being used simply for backup checks, we could soon see social media being used to predict how competent someone will be at a job before they’ve even started. That is if the results of an experiment by a group of university researchers are anything to go by.

Researchers at Northern Illinois University, the University of Evansville and Auburn University conducted a study where three ‘raters’ reviewed the Facebook profiles of students who were already employed. Having spent just ten minutes on their profiles, they were then asked a number of questions, such as how trustworthy they would rate the candidate. Six months later, their answers were then contrasted with job performance reports by the students’ employers where they found that the ‘raters’ were able to predict job performance to a high degree of accuracy.

The researchers have reasoned that since it’s difficult to fake your personality through Facebook, your profile can be taken as a reliable source for predicting job performance, relating to areas such as how conscientious they are. The number of friends someone had also came into account; instead of viewing their photos of them socialising as a negative, this was actually (rightly so!) considered favourably.

Death of the interview?

Now while this experiment is exactly that, it’s not too much of a stretch to see it coming out of the lab and into the interview room. While many Facebook/social media studies are often flawed, producing premature results based on one-sided studies, this is surprisingly refreshing. Rather than starting with a conclusion that Facebook is ‘bad’, which many studies of this type do, it is a genuine, open exploration of the relationship between Facebook persoanlities, real-life personalities and what this means when it comes to job performance.

Recruitment has changed for good. We often decide on whether a job candidate is suitable or not before we see them, with the interview becoming more and more of a formality. What can you really glean from it, when you can read their work online, scan recommendations on LinkedIn or scan entire showreels on their own sites?

What’s needed is education for employers in how to handle the information they’re faced with on a candidate’s social media profile. If there are photos of a drunken night out on a candidate’s profile, so what! That’s what people do. If we can learn to properly digest what we see on social media profiles and understand the distinction between work and private life, not only could it make the recruitment process more effective for the employer and ultimately less stressful on the candidate, it could also see us making predictions on their aptitude for the job at hand.

Of course, it’s not the case that social media is going to make the traditional interview obsolete any time soon, but eventually it could become even more effective.