Column: Your Facebook is a resume

By Brian Sorensen

Hopefully you already expect your prospective employers, relationship partners and random stalkers to be looking you up on Facebook. It is 2012 after all.

What may surprise you is that some bright minds at Northern Illinois U. can tell how good a worker you are after five minutes of staring at your timeline. The study found that people’s Facebook profiles do seem to reflect their true personality — whether they like it or not. As such, researchers were able to accurately predict the worker’s scores on the “Big Five” personality traits.

For those of you outside the social sciences, the “Big Five” are five personality traits that vary along a continuum. These traits are openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.

When I first read this study, my research methods class started coming back to me. I wanted to find all the things wrong with the study so I could simply dismiss it. While I did find a few methodological missteps, I decided to try it out for myself.

The study implies that anyone could grade a Facebook profile given the proper criteria. So I went ahead and gave my own Facebook profile a grade in each of the “Big Five” traits. I then checked those scores against a previous “Big Five” inventory I happened to have taken (I am a psychology major after all). The results were rather surprising. While my test was amateur at best, it showed that it is possible to obtain an accurate reading from a Facebook profile, which begs the question — should employers be doing the exact same thing?

My first reaction is “why not?” If you publish things on the Internet, you should resign yourself to the fact that none of it is private and there is nothing you can do about it. Besides, it is not really necessary to post your most recent drinking binge for everyone and their mothers to see — literally.

But this study does not simply deal with embarrassing posts, it also uses your common every day postings. This is where things get murky and, in my opinion, a bit far-fetched. Sure, the person posting sappy and depressing statuses every hour on the hour may actually be a manic-depressive — or they could have just watched the latest episode of “The Walking Dead.”

The issue here is whether or not you believe that employers and the like should have the right to view your “emotional property.” These days it seems like everything is becoming protected under some act or another (see: your genetic information). If this practice starts growing, chances are you may be lobbying for the de facto privacy of your timeline.

In the meantime, consider your Facebook to be just another form of your resume. Employers will look at it and they can tell if you lied. And no, they will not be impressed that you shared a “KONY 2012” video.

Read more here: http://dailyevergreen.com/read/opinion-facebook-acts-like-a-resume
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