CorpComms Magazine

Companies who want to learn about their prospective employees can learn a lot by checking their Facebook profiles, according to a new academic study.

Jennifer Golbeck, co-director of Human Computer Interaction Lab at the University of Maryland, surveyed the public profiles of nearly 300 Facebook users.

She considered information on favourite activities, television shows, films, music, books and quotes, alongside 'About Me' and 'Blurb' sections.

Status updates or data that is only available to users' online friends was not analysed.

Each of the subjects were then given a test that measures the 'big five' personality traits: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.

Golbeck said: 'It turns out you can get to within ten per cent of a person's personality score by looking at Facebook. Lots of organisations make their employees take personality tests. If you can guess someone's personality pretty quickly on the web, you don't need them to take the test.'

The study found that users who tested as 'extrovert' on the personality test had more friends on Facebook, although their networks tended to be sparse as the friends they made were less likely to know each other.

Users who had long surnames tended to be more neurotic, according to the study, which added: 'A lifetime of having one's long last name misspelled may lead to a person expressing more anxiety and quickness to anger'.

The study is being presented at the Computer Human Interaction conference in Vancouver this week.

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