No Facebook, no face
You might not be on social media. But as Gareth Jones argues, recruitment will prosper without you‘But what if I’m not on Facebook?’
That was a question that got many of the other members of the audience nodding when I spoke recently at an event focused on technology and how values drive engagement.
As it turns out, I was among esteemed company.
David MacLeod, the leader of the government’s taskforce on Engagement, of which I am a member (and currently undergoing therapy as a consequence of) kicked off the day. I had the honour of delivering my session immediately after the afternoon keynote from the highly entertaining Adrian Furnham – a lecturer, prolific author and authority on human behaviour, and a tough act to follow.
My session was entitled The Five Predictors of Performance: The Importance of Values in Selection. (Try to stay awake at the back there.) It explored why we put so much reliance on experience when assessing potential and performance of talent, when actually it is by far the least reliable predictor of either.
Want to know someone’s potential? Then you need to deep-dive into their behaviour, values, motivations and intellect. Without doing so, you may as well identify talent by tossing a golf ball out of the office window and hiring whoever it hits. Seriously.
Tomorrow’s assessment
Anyway, I ended the session with a glimpse into the future of assessment.
You see, at the moment the world of assessment is dominated by questionnaires. The armchair psychologists amongst you HR folk will be acutely familiar with the tools: OPQ32, Watson Glaser Ranra, Intrinsic, Hogan etc.
However, following on from my last column, I draw your attention to a research study around the whole subject of unstructured social content – those pesky tweets and Facebook updates.
The project – Personality, Gender, and Age in the Language of Social Media: The Open-Vocabulary Approach – undertaken as part of the broader World Wellbeing Project is the largest study of personality and language ever completed.
For the cut-to-the-chase types amongst you, there is a good summary here from Business Insider.
By analysing 75,000 Facebook profiles and personality questionnaire results from the same sample, the researchers analysed more than 700 million words and phrases and as a result ‘found an entirely different way to analyse human behaviour’.
This is big news! Why? Well, because as the researchers identified:
The “open-vocabulary approach” of analyzing all words was shown to be equally predictive (and in some cases more so) than traditional methods used by psychologists, such as self-reported surveys and questionnaires.
Social invisibility
Did you get it? ‘Equally predictive, and in some cases more so, than traditional questionnaires.’ All that Facebook rambling can predict your personality – who’d have thought it?
Suffice to say I’m excited by this research and it was sharing this excitement at the event that prompted the question from our friend in the audience:
‘But what if I’m not on Facebook?’
And he has a point. Not everyone is on Facebook. And if you don’t as yet have some form of ‘social footprint’ (where have you been? In prison?) then clearly you are not going to pop up to the top of the list on a social recruiting drive, no matter how talented you might appear to be.
Nor will anyone be able to assess your personality without making you take one of the dreaded questionnaires.
But my comment back to the person in question, delivered as objectively as possible, was that it doesn’t actually matter that he wasn’t on Facebook. Or any other social platform for that matter.
Because HE doesn’t matter.
Sounds harsh, but pretty soon, if not already, if you can’t be found or assessed via these new technologies and approaches, you won’t exist.
Shock horror! Is an organisation likely therefore to miss your unique talents as a result? Yes, most definitely. Does it matter? Yes, but only to you – not to employers.
Because, for the majority of professional roles that we would use this technology for, there is already a large enough pool of people out there that are accessible via social media.
So you will be missed, but you won’t be missed. If you get my drift.
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