Abstract
PurposeJob-related social networking websites (e.g. LinkedIn) are often used in the recruitment process because the profiles contain valuable information such as education level and work experience. The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether people can accurately infer a profile owner’s self-rated personality traits based on the profile on a job-related social networking site.Design/methodology/approachIn two studies, raters inferred personality traits (the Big Five and self-presentation) from LinkedIn profiles (total n=275). The authors related those inferences to self-rated personality by the profile owner to test if the inferences were accurate.FindingsUsing information gained from a LinkedIn profile allowed for better inferences of extraversion and self-presentation of the profile owner (r’s of 0.24-0.29).Practical implicationsWhen using a LinkedIn profile to estimate trait extraversion or self-presentation, one becomes 1.5 times as likely to actually select the person with higher trait extraversion compared to the person with lower trait extraversion.Originality/valueAlthough prior research tested whether profiles of social networking sites (such as Facebook) can be used to accurately infer self-rated personality, this was not yet tested for job-related social networking sites (such as LinkedIn). The results indicate that profiles at job-related social networks, in spite of containing only relatively standardized information, “leak” information about the owner’s personality.
Highlights
Job-related social networking websites (e.g. LinkedIn) are often used in the recruitment process because the profiles contain valuable information such as education level and work experience
Even though all profile owners were working for the same company and might have been more similar to each other, we still replicated the extraversion finding from Study 1 that self-rated extraversion can be inferred from someone’s LinkedIn profile
We think it is unlikely that these traits can be accurately inferred from LinkedIn profiles
Summary
Job-related social networking websites (e.g. LinkedIn) are often used in the recruitment process because the profiles contain valuable information such as education level and work experience. The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether people can accurately infer a profile owner’s self-rated personality traits based on the profile on a job-related social networking site. Cues in the profile picture (clothing style, a rebellious pose, etc.) or the number of groups one is a member of can help to predict personality (Stopfer et al, 2014; Gosling et al, 2011) Such online-based personality predictions are more closely related to actual personality than to the ideal personality of the profile owner (a self-rating of how the profile owner would ideally want to score on a given trait; Back et al, 2010). Job-related social network profiles (such as LinkedIn) differ from social network profiles in a number of ways that makes it necessary to test whether personality can be inferred from those profiles
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