Studies You Should Know: Social Media Profiling: How Your Online Life Shapes Hiring Decisions
The Question
Most job seekers know that hiring managers look at social media. What is less understood is precisely how that information is used, which content matters most, and whether the things HR professionals find most useful are actually the things most relevant to job performance. Hartwell and colleagues (2024) examined both the perceptions and the actual rating behaviour of HR professionals when evaluating applicants’ social media, using a two-study design that moves from attitudes to behaviour.
The Theoretical Framework
The study draws on three theoretical frameworks to make sense of how social media information enters hiring decisions. Identity theory suggests that people express who they are across different social contexts, and that personal and professional social media profiles communicate different aspects of self-presentation. Situational strength theory holds that strong, well-defined situations constrain behaviour and reduce the influence of individual differences, while weak situations allow personality and personal characteristics to show through more freely. The realistic accuracy model provides a framework for understanding when and how observers make accurate judgments about others’ characteristics (Hartwell et al., 2024). Together, these frameworks generate predictions about which kinds of social media content HR professionals will attend to, and why.
Study One: What HR Professionals Think They Use
The first study surveyed 310 HR professionals about which types of social media content they perceive as most useful for assessing job applicants on various work-related constructs. This established a baseline of perceived utility before examining whether those perceptions actually translate into rating behaviour (Hartwell et al., 2024). It is an important methodological step: people’s beliefs about how they make decisions frequently diverge from how they actually make them.
Study Two: What HR Professionals Actually Do
The second study moved from perception to behaviour. One hundred and fifty-one HR professionals participated in an experimental hiring simulation in which social media content was systematically manipulated. This allowed the researchers to isolate the causal effect of different types of social media content on applicant ratings (Hartwell et al., 2024).
The results revealed two findings worth sitting with.
First, non-job-related social media content influenced ratings of work-related constructs more strongly than job-related content did (Hartwell et al., 2024). In other words, the personal posts, photographs, opinions, and lifestyle content that applicants share in ostensibly non-professional contexts had a larger impact on how HR professionals evaluated their work-relevant characteristics than the professional content candidates might intentionally curate to impress employers. This is a striking inversion of what most applicants would assume or intend.
Second, professional social media was rated more favourably than personal social media overall (Hartwell et al., 2024). This is intuitive enough: a well-maintained LinkedIn profile signals professional identity in ways a personal Instagram does not. But combined with the first finding, a more complex picture emerges. Personal content may be weighted more heavily precisely because it is seen as a less managed, more authentic signal of who the applicant really is, even as it is evaluated less favourably in aggregate.
Why It Matters
The findings have implications running in several directions at once.
For applicants, the message is uncomfortable but clear: the content posted in personal social media contexts, even when not intended for professional audiences, can carry significant weight in hiring decisions and may be evaluated on criteria the poster never anticipated.
For HR professionals and organisations, the findings raise harder questions about validity and fairness. If non-job-related content influences ratings of work-related constructs more than job-related content, the obvious question is whether those inferences are accurate. Personal social media content reflects a weak situation in which individual characteristics show through more freely, which is theoretically consistent with it carrying diagnostic value. But it is also a context shaped by demographics, cultural background, and social circumstance in ways that professional content is not, raising legitimate concerns about whether social media profiling introduces bias into hiring decisions that organisations may not be tracking or correcting for (Hartwell et al., 2024).
Reference
Hartwell, C. J., Harrison, J. T., & Campion, M. A. (2024). Social media profiling: The influence of personal and professional social media content on hiring ratings. International Journal of Selection and Assessment. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1111/ijsa.12502
