Turns out recruiters don't actually care about your social media profile
Conventional job-hunting wisdom dictates: make sure your social media accounts are clean, free of unprofessional photos or comments, or otherwise hidden on the private setting.
Perhaps a potential employer could be lurking on LinkedIn, and what you post could affect your chances of getting that job.
But the University of New South Wales’ Business School has rubbished this, with new research finding that there’s “little to no” correlation between a job candidate’s social media profile and their potential performance or retention levels.
UNSW Business School School of Management lecturer Liwen Zhang created studies that examined job hunters’ social media profiles and whether this content was taken into consideration by recruiters.
“We tried to standardise the process to help improve the validity of these assessments. We provided training to recruiters, and provided more standardised evaluation forms, and tried to have multiple recruiters to assess the same applicants,” Zhang said.
“But the results show that this does not really appear to improve the prediction of future job behaviours or withdrawal intentions.”
The research also raised questions about the extent to which content found on social media profiles could be considered in hiring decisions.
“Applicants’ discriminatory posts and behaviours are often not welcomed at the workplace,” Zhang said. “We categorise such behaviours and statements as ‘information that may be a concern to an organisation’.
“I think it could be fair for organisations to review this information from social media and use it in staffing decisions.
“However, if recruiters use applicants’ ethnicity or marriage status information obtained from social media sites, this will raise legal concerns.”
And while recruiters might not ask for your social media profiles directly, there are other ways they may go about it, Zhang added.
“We do see recruiters [effectively] demanding access in various ways, such as using a social media profile login to create an application profile, or to sign a consent agreement.”
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