Employers routinely use Facebook to screen candidates

Employers use social network site Facebook to screen job applicants, according to results of research carried out by researchers at Ghent University (UGent). The team used 2,000 fictitious applications to compile the findings.

Researchers did not include photographs with the CVs they sent. Each employer received four CVs that corresponded to fictitious Facebook profiles with different kinds of profile pictures. The researchers compared the chances of being contacted for an interview depending on the Facebook photo.

“The candidate with the most favourable Facebook profile photo got 21% more positive reactions to his application, compared to the candidate with the least favourable photo,” said UGent professor Stijn Baert, who led the study. “The difference in being immediately invited for a job interview amounted to almost 40%.”

As the Facebook photos were the only substantial difference between the applications, the experiment showed that a significant number of employers screen candidates via Facebook. Another finding was that highly educated applicants were screened more often than applicants for more low-skilled jobs.

Contrary to the researchers’ expectations, candidates for professions with a great deal of contact with clients were not screened more often via Facebook.

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