Gone are the days when all job seekers had to worry about were their résumés and cover letters. Today, those documents still remain a staple of the job search process, but they are joined by a significant and growing pre-screening phenomenon: reviewing an applicant’s social-networking websites (SNW). Some job seekers are even being asked for their Facebook passwords during or right after an initial interview. Even Terror outfits are using Facebook as a recruitment tool to recruit loners from Western nations to their cause, claims a leading counter-terrorism expert.

Employers are increasingly turning to Facebook and other social-networking sites to pre-screen new hires because it may be a fairly accurate reflection of how good they’ll be at the target job, according to a study published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology last month.

Researchers hired HR types to rate hundreds of college students’ Facebook pages using questions that reflected Big Five personality characteristics (Extraversion, Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability, Agreeableness, and Openness to Experience). The researchers asked HR professionals to rate the Facebook profiles to predict how well the students would fare as employees.

Six months later, the researchers followed up by contacting the current employers of the people whose profiles had been rated. They found a strong correlation between the predictions made by the Facebook raters and the actual performances as rated by the employers. 

Furthermore, the psychometric properties of the study were fairly decent:

• First, SNW ratings demonstrated sufficient inter-rater reliability and internal consistency.

• Second, ratings via SNWs demonstrated convergent validity with self-ratings of the Big Five characteristics.

• Third, SNW ratings correlated with job performance, hirability, and academic performance criteria and the magnitude of these correlations was generally larger than for self-ratings.

• Finally, SNW ratings accounted for significant variance in the criterion measures beyond self-ratings of personality and cognitive ability.

In this virtual day and age, it is critically important to remember that what you put online, even if it’s a mistake, may not be reversible and may not go away. The red flags for most employers seem to be drugs, drinking, badmouthing former employers, and lying about one’s credentials or qualifications. Yet, Facebook profiles usually contain a wealth of information that employers are prohibited, under federal, state and local laws, from using in discriminatory ways. Photos and posts can reveal race, gender, age, national origin, disability, even sexual orientation. 

Key takeaway? Your online presence may be used as an initial screening interview about your personality or your reputation—be circumspect about what you post and get onto that privacy policy page and limit who can see what about you. In Othello, Shakespeare’s Iago may have had it pegged: “Reputation is an idle and most false imposition; oft got without merit, and lost without deserving . . . ”

The current class of college graduates is one of the most educated, technologically advanced, and technically skilled to ever enter the workforce. According to the New York Times, however, 22% are working in jobs that do not require a college degree, and 22.4% aren’t working at all.

Although the economy can be blamed for some of this problem, the widespread and persistent nature of under- and unemployment beg the question: What is keeping this otherwise talented young generation from succeeding in the workforce?

In a recent talk for the Cambridge Assessment Network, Dr. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic discussed the underlying psychology of employability and career success.

Watch the video

For more about employability, read our recently-released whitepaper: “Are You Employable?”

The US economy is dragging and unemployment rates are at historically high levels, but this too shall pass. Carnevale, et al. suggest that the so-called Baby Boomers are rapidly leaving the labor market, and that by 2018, the US will face a serious shortage of people having the necessary expertise for the economy. This raises a couple of interesting questions. One concerns what the employers of 2018 will regard at the necessary expertise. A second question concerns what the high demand jobs will be in 2018.

Some people think that training in science, math, engineering and technology is critical for future employment. But it turns out that graduates of prestigious liberal arts schools like Amherst and Pomona have little trouble finding good jobs. Moreover, high tech companies place relatively little value on content knowledge, they are more interested in a candidate's career potential (employability). Wagner reports that relatively few jobs actually require using mathematics, and that American executives mostly complain that new applicants are unable to grasp new situations and express themselves clearly - if applicants have "good attitudes" (employability), companies like General Electric can teach them what they need to know. Finally, salaries for well-trained engineers top out at around $130,000; thus, when ambitious engineers approach age 40, they try to move into sales or management. So much for technical skills training.

The first large scale study of what employers want was conducted by the US Department of Labor; the Secretary's Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills (SCANS) surveyed business owners, union officials, public employees, managers, and private sector workers to determine the performance demands of modern employment. The SCANS' survey identified five broad categories of critical competencies as follows:

1. Being able to identify and allocate resources
2. Being able to work with others
3. Being able to acquire and use information
4. Being able to understand complex inter-relationships
5. Being able to work with a variety of technologies

The Department of Labor has always focused on cognitive ability as the key to employment, so identifying the ability to work with others as important is noteworthy.

Organizations used to recruit job applicants primarily through newspaper want ads, which reflected what employers want in new hires. Hogan and Brinkmeyer subscribed to newspapers from each demographic region of the US for six months, and clipped every major employment ad (N=6326). They then content analyzed the ads. Among their key findings: Interpersonal skills were considered essential for 71% of the jobs involving client contact, 83% of the jobs involving subordinate interaction, 84% of the jobs requiring management interactions, and 78% of the jobs requiring coworker interaction. Clearly, from the employers' perspective, the most important single characteristic impacting employability is interpersonal skill. We doubt that these findings will change very much over time - the content of jobs may change, but a good employee is a good employee.

Boudreau, Boswell, and Judge report that ratings for "employability" during the hiring process predict compensation levels after people are on the job. This suggests that hiring and operational managers respond to the same aspects of an employee's behavior, which is obviously something other than pure job performance. Van der Heijde and Van der Heijden show that the essence of employability is socially desirable behavior on the job - and by extension during the hiring process. Scores on their measure of social desirability predicted promotions, income, and time spent unemployed. This points to an important link between employability and career success - the link concerns the ability to put on a socially desirable performance during both hiring interviews and subsequent social interaction at work. Hogan & Shelton describe socially desirable behavior as a role performance designed to allow people to fit in and get along with those with whom they must interact. The evidence clearly indicates that the ability to put on a socailly desirable performance is associated with  a wide range of positive career outcomes, although academic psychology chooses to ignore this finding.

Employability and Career Success depend on behaving in socially desirable ways. To do this requires specific competencies:

1. Seeming smart
2. Seeming compliant and conforming
3. Seeming sensitive (interpersonal skill)

Job performance is largely defined in terms of supervisors' ratings; in very general terms, supervisors like employees who seem smart - and this explains the consistent correlations between cognitive ability and job performance. Supervisors also like employees who are compliant, obedient, and conforming - and this explains the consistent correlations between measures of Conscientiousness and job performance. Finally, supervisors like employees with interpersonal skill - because they are rewarding to deal with.

This model also explains why so many high IQ people are unemployable. Some, despite their high IQs, don't seem very smart based on the kinds of choices they make. Others are independent, non-conforming, and insubordinate. And still others are irritable, challenging, and disputatious - not rewarding to deal with.

As for the workforce future, consider the table presented below and its consequences:

Ten Occupations with the Greatest Growth Increase 2008 - 2018
(US total projected job growth = 10.0%)
US Bureau of Labor Statistics

We see three major consequences of these trends. First, selection will continue to be an important line of business, and the table contains the selection categtories of the future. Second, a key component of employability is flexibility, and that concerns being willing to consider employment in jobs other than those for which one has been trained. And third, interpersonal skill will be important for retention in any of these jobs.

References available