Enterprises are using more and more information provided in social networks to find qualified human resources and to learn more about aspirants. Internet appearance allows them to draw conclusions about characteristics of the candidates. Online games, generating personality profiles in the background too manifest potentially the aspirant´s warranty of fitness for a particular job. A human resources managers´ index done by the job application software enterprise “Jobvite” showed that 93 per cent of the 1000 human resources managers, they interviewed informed themselves about their candidates via “LinkedIn”.
2 thirds investigated in “Facebook” and more than half of them took a look on “Twitter”-accounts of their aspirants.
Personality testing became accepted in application screening. Numerous studies demonstrate that these procedures allow more precise prediction for professional career than a glance at letters of reference and the portfolio or the job interview. The best tests base on the so called big five. These factors of personality are: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism (emotional stability). Along all kinds of professions particularly conscientiousness and emotional stability proved to be important for professional success. Digital appearances seem to reveal a lot about our personality. Test persons at the University of Texas in Austin were able to estimate conscientiousness and openness of people on the basis of their websites equal to long time personal friends.
There are software programmes analysing automatically all available data of the internet. Examples are “Tweet Psych” and “YouAreWhatYouLike”. The first one reviews one person´s activity in Twitter using special categories like learning, handling of money, feelings, anxiety etc. . Comparisons with other persons in the data base are possible. If a human resources manager marked two candidates with similar qualification, he could look for the more optimistic one of them with the help of this programme.
The application “YouAreWhatYouLike” creates personal profiles following the 5 factor of personality model on the base of the clicks on the “like”-bottom in facebook, the person which came into consideration, made. In this case the user has to permit the access to this appreciation.
Market leader in the area of social networks is facebook with more than one billion users, nevertheless the human resources manager use mainly LinkedIn for recruitment. LinkedIn is a unique creation for this specific purpose. The newest function of LinkedIn is the posting of endorsements as a digital equivalent to traditional letter of reference.
The development of recruiting software focuses on algorithms to summarize all online information about a person including not only social networks but also reports, blogs, e-shopping lists, e-mails, forum contributions and all what is more in the internet. Maybe in future the enterprises are able to find their diamond employees before they even did send a letter of application.
(This summary is based on a report “Recruiting 2.0” by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic and Christopher Steinmetz in “Gehirn und Geist. Das Magazin für Psychologie und Hirnforschung”, edited by Spektrum der Wissenschaft Verlag, Nr. 4/2014, page 28 to 33)
