The Application of Social Media Evaluation in the Personnel Selection

Abstract

Social media evaluation on which foreign human resources experts have done a lot of research is a new way of personnel selection in the Internet Plus” age and its application in personnel selection is increasing. More and more organizations, in foreign countries, begin to assess the content of candidates’ social media like Facebook to collect relevant information of potential employees and take that information as a basis for judgment of making personnel decisions. Based on a review of personnel assessment technology in our country, problems of personnel assessment which the process is complicated and the content lacks accuracy are outstanding increasingly along with the rapid development of computer and internet technologies, so it is necessary to learn about personnel assessment technology which is the latest, in order to promote further innovation and development of China’s personnel assessment. This paper analyzes the newest personnel assessment technique, namely social media evaluation technique. Firstly, it discusses two theoretical models that social media evaluation technique uses, namely lens model and realistic accuracy model. In the lens model, social media information of the candidates is regarded as visible behavior, the candidates’ personalities, intelligence, emotional intelligence and work motivations are taken as potential characteristics and the candidates’ future work performance is seen as distal variable; in the realistic accuracy model, the target object can be obtained from social media information which is described as behavior information. This behavior information is self-expression that is associated with certain personality traits, and the assessor can use this information to obtain the characteristics that may be related to job performance. Secondly, it presents the specific application mode of this technique; researchers often use structural classification to divide the content collected from the social media of candidates into structures including cognitive ability, knowledge and skills related to work, personalities, social application skills and interest, organizational adaptability and physical quality, and so on, and then find out the correlation between position and these structures. And then it summarizes the advantages and disadvantages. Its advantages mainly include that savings on economic and time costs of personnel selection, and the provision of more real information about personnel selection; its disadvantages mainly include three aspects: firstly, the non-standardized characteristic of social media evaluation determines that the reliability of this technique is affected by the subjective impact of the assessors; secondly, the mismatch of the social media evaluation determines that its validity is affected by the candidates’ disguise; thirdly, the reliability and validity of this evaluation technique is affected by the number and type of information. Finally, this paper puts forward relevant enlightenment and thinking according to the analysis, that is to say, the application of social media evaluation technique in China must protect the privacy of those who will be evaluated, and the objection of this evaluation technique should be the youth because they have higher usage frequency of social media, the use of social media evaluation technique is more suitable to evaluate the candidates’ personalities and values, the development of this evaluation technique in the future can be inclined to the workplace social platform assessment, such as LinkedIn, tenderness, and street network in our country; furthermore, organizations and researchers can also further explore the development of an objective social media tool, and at the same time, cannot regard social media evaluation technique as the only means of evaluation in personnel selection. Those enlightenment and thinking would help people, organizations or the society to have a better understanding of this new way of personnel selection, namely social media evaluation technique, and its application and development in the internet and information age. Overall, in the internet era, there is still great potential value of social media evaluation, and the organizations and researchers in China have further exploration and application space.