Facebook Profiles as Predictors of Job Performance? Maybe…but not yet.

Eric Loken explains:

Some newspapers and radio stations recently picked up a story that Facebook profiles can be revealing, and can yield information more predictive of job performance than typical self-report personality questionnaires or even an IQ test. . . .

A most consistent finding from the last 50 years of organizational psychology research is that cognitive ability is the strongest predictor of job performance, sometimes followed closely by measures of conscientiousness (and recently there has been interest in perseverance or grit). So has the Facebook study upended all this established research? Not at all, and the reason lies in the enormous gap between the claims about the study’s outcomes, and the details of what was actually done.

The researchers had two college population samples. In Study 1 they had job performance ratings for the part-time college jobs of about 10% of the original sample. But in study 1 they did not have any IQ or cognitive ability measure. In Study 2 they gathered Wonderlic’s measure of cognitive ability, but this time they had no job performance data but rather college GPA which they say is correlated with job performance. . . . All in all this particular research has very little of value to add about predicting job performance in any real world setting.

2 thoughts on “Facebook Profiles as Predictors of Job Performance? Maybe…but not yet.

  1. I don’t entirely swallow it myself, but chapter six of “Making Software..” by Oram and Wilson reports research claiming that for many jobs performance is developed by learning during experience and training and that IQ influences only the speed of learning, not the perfomance once all those compared have had time to learn all that needs to be learnt. They recommend attempt to measure the acquired skill directly, rather the IQ that controls how quickly that skill has been acquired.

  2. Man, I hope not, Facebook is my least favorite social media site and the one I feel least comfortable posting any kind of revealing information to…

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