Employers rejecting job-seekers whose drunken exploits are plastered all over Facebook
Employers are being warned that trawling Facebook for incriminating snaps of budding applicants risks them missing out on the best candidates.
Researchers at North Carolina State University looked for desirable personality traits such as conscientiousness, agreeableness and extroversion in 175 participants before mapping their Facebook activity to marry online behaviour with specific traits.
NCSU professor of psychology Lori Foster Thompson warned companies scanning profiles for evidence of drug and alcohol abuse were missing a trick, saying: “We found that there is no significant correlation between conscientiousness and an individual’s willingness to post content on Facebook about alcohol or drug use.”
Will Stoughton, lead author of the study, added: “This means companies are eliminating some conscientious job applicants based on erroneous assumptions regarding what social media behaviour tells us about the applicants.”
Instead Stoughton advises employers to focus instead on those who bad-mouth others.