You’re not active on Facebook? You may not be qualified to work as an Engineer.
Not Tweeting? Sorry, you can’t be hired in the Travel & Tourism industry.
No Pinterest board? You’re future as a Chef just hit a major roadblock.
To rational people such statements will seem ridiculous but in reality they’re not far from becoming factual accounts of real life job seekers if the alarming social influence measurement trend is not curbed quickly.
Gauging a person’s influence is nothing new in the marketing world and recently the socialverse has been turned on its ear with the hullabaloo over pseudo influence measurement tools such as Peerindex, Klout and Kred. Sadly, this trend is making its way into other areas of business including Human Resources. New tools such as Reppify, Identified and BranchOut are targeting HR executives with the promise of providing accurate insights into the personality and even qualifications of potential hires based on one’s social interactions.
Yes, you read that right. Analytics software is predicting your qualifications for any job type based on your social conversations. Reppify, for example is a new service that provides recruiters and HR teams an online dashboard that pulls data from LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and even GitHub profiles. By scanning the job candidate’s resume and social connections it generates a “job fit score” for “reputation,” “influence,” “footprint,” and “overall candidacy .
To their credit, unlike flawed influence measurement tools like Klout.com, Reppify allows hiring managers to set some parameters with which to score candidates. However, the fact remains that your personal social engagements are being scanned to determine your fitness for a job that most likely has nothing to do with social engagement, like a network engineer or a quality assurance analyst.
There’s Reality and then there’s Reality.
Reppify representatives argue that their service, unlike Klout or PeerIndex, asks permission before it creates a score; however, that’s only half true. Reppify uses the email address and resume data you provide to a potential employer to match it with the public data it gathers from Google searches as well information from social network that don’t require a “friend-level connection”; in other words anything you post publicly on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Etc. So a score based on limited resources establishes an initial impression and metric about your job candidacy for HR managers who subscribe to the service.
Reppify notifies you that a potential employer generated this initial score and offers you the option to grant it access to your private social network connections and data so it may augment the initial score. If you accept, you’re granting a third party (and a potential employer) access to information you purposely didn’t share publicly. If you don’t accept, you’re essentially creating another impression of yourself. What do you have to hide? Without sharing that additional information with the potential employer using Reppify, you’re job application is labelled with a limited score.
Some, like the CEO of Reppify argue that there’s no need to worry about such scores since they are only one tool in a list of apps and measurements used to determine your job compatibility, but from personal experience I can tell you that overworked HR teams don’t exercise such sound judgement in these decisions. And mine is just one of many such stories. If you choose to opt-out altogether you’re required to shut off public access to all your personal information across all social sites. The onus is on you to do so. And once again, based on personal experience with Klout, “opting out” really means they can and will reinstate you at their leisure or when it suits them.
When did we lose the importance of human insights?
When an HR manager or potential employer chooses to do some research on you as a candidate and scans your LinkedIn profile or tweets on Twitter, he is forced to exercise some judgement through the context of the information he’s reading. Software doesn’t utilize such filters and, for example, may record comments you disagree with – but are posting to share with others – as your views.
“If I get a recruit who has only half a dozen connections on Twitter or LinkedIn, they are tainted with the belief that they are not connected and not up-to-date,” reports Human Capital Management Systems CEO Trevor Vas. Perception is reality and those perceptions are formed with lack of data as much as they are with thousands of data points. Never has this been truer than in our over-connected world where social engagement is given so much importance.
Where you have HR scoring systems based on social interactions, just like the marketing versions before them, you will see people gaming the system to mislead those they wish to impress, further poluting the metrics and diminishing the validity of the score’s claim. And there’s no end in sight. From marketing to HR and next: Customer Service. Via Salesforce.com interface, call centre operators now have access to a callers’ Klout score so they can respond with the appropriate amount of deference if someone has a complaint (be extra nice if they have a high Klout score…don’t fret if they have a low score).
Again I find myself calling out businesses for their reliance on third party social scoring metrics as any form of guideline in making business decisions. The increasing volume of content being generated on the Web and through social channels (what some are calling “Big Data”) isn’t necessarily “Smart Data”. Proponents of these tools and services will claim that those who use them understand that they are limited and should be used as one of many factors in making business decisions. However, we understand the reality of tight budgets, short timelines and frankly, human nature. Where a short cut is available, the short cut is almost always used.
Am I the only one who is frightened at what the future holds as businesses continue to use pseudo-scientific analysis of people’s social media engagement (or lack thereof) as indicators of real real-life substance or value? People thought Klout was harmless yet the trend is now permeating other areas of the business with reckless abandon. I pray that this trend will turn out to be a fad we’ll all be laughing at 5 years from now, like bell-bottom pants or leg warmers. In the meantime, someone needs to give those executives relying on such tools a reality check.
Sam Fiorella – Sensei
Feed Your Community, Not Your Ego
Feed Your Community, Not Your Ego
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