Is Twitter a Reliable Candidate Assessment Tool?

 As we have written many times on here, the resume is dead. Well, it’s not entirely dead as most employers still request resumes, but to think that resumes are the only device being relied upon to assess candidates would be naïve. Resumes are part of an application jigsaw comprised of tools like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter feeds, Pinterest, and surveys show that most employers now use social media to background check candidates and to help support decisions on the suitability of candidates. The obvious question now is, “Just how reliable are social media sources for background checking?”

The general wisdom is that LinkedIn is as reliable as a resume although LinkedIn profiles may not be as up to date as a freshly prepared resume. Facebook has been shown to be reliable in some areas and unreliable in other areas.

But, what about Twitter? Is the ephemeral and therefore hard to grasp social medium of Twitter unsuited to reliable background checking? Can reliable assessment of personalities be made from a Twitter account?

Well, according to this study at the University of Cambridge of 335 Twitter users, it can. They identified four types of twitter users:

• Listeners (people who follow many users)
• Popular (users who are followed by many)
• Highly-read (users who are listed in others reading list)
• Influentials (tweets are clicked, replied to, retweeted and acted upon)

Having four types of Twitter personalities is a useful criteria for assessing a candidate’s social media behavior, but what can this tell us about his/her corresponding behavior in the real world? Does a Twitter “listener” also listen well in the real world?

Well, what the study also found was that all the users types are emotionally stable, low in neuroticism and they are in the main extrovert. In addition, users deemed popular on Twitter were found to be “imaginative” in the real world, and influential users tend to be “organized” in the real world.

But, the research doesn’t stop there as another study by the University of Maryland looked at lots of words to see if there was a correlation between use of words on twitter and their personality, in particular, the big five personality traits: Extroversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Neuroticism and Openness. They found that the personality traits of agreeableness and openness could be more reliably predicted than the others. But, there were many specific correlations that could be made and these are shown below.

For example, people who talk a lot about work topics such as job, majorandxerox tend to be more conscientious; yet, those who talk about death using words such as bury, coffin, kill or negative emotion words like hurt, ugly, nasty,  and crying tend to be less conscientious. Individuals who are certain, using world like always and never tend to score high on openness. You can see the full results below.

This research confirms many of the intuitive insights that many of us may have had about Twitter usage and personality and shows that using Twitter for personality assessment for a job can be reliable, to a degree.

However, there is no question that this kind of background checking is in its early days and shows that recruiters should tread with caution and give candidates the benefit of the doubt as much as possible when using Twitter background checking as a selection tool. It is in no way ready to form the primary or even secondary selection tool and should act as a backup to the more robust candidate assessment methods of resume sifting, assessment tests and interviews.