Auburn researcher helps discover links between Facebook profiles, personality and job

http://wireeagle.auburn.edu/news/4308
Companies lose money on employee turnover and are always trying to find new ways to gauge the potential success of a new employee. While personality is only a small facet of what determines an employee's success, Facebook could have the potential to affect how companies view a person's chance at a new job.

The study looked at five traits often examined in organizational studies: conscientiousness, agreeableness, extraversion, emotional stability and openness. These traits have been variously linked to decisions to hire individuals and estimates of their job success and compatibility with other workers. The study also suggests raters can be trained to view aspects of a job-seeker's Facebook profile to produce reliable assessments on these personality traits.

"The legality of employers viewing Facebook is an emerging issue, and, with some companies now asking applicants for their Facebook passwords, the calls for legislative protections will only get stronger."

What Facebook page?

On a more serious note, I spent twenty years helping protect our Constitutional rights and freedoms. If a company cannot respect them, including our right to privacy, they've already eliminated themselves as a potential employer.

"Employee turnover" is corporate code for "we don't pay our employees enough, so when they leave for better salaries, we're going to demonize them as the ungrateful little wage-serfs they are"...

If companies paid their employees a decent wage, provided decent benefits, exerted even a token effort of loyalty and support for skilled workers, and didn't view their employees as "human resources--like they were chattel or nothing more than semi-sentient office supplies, perhaps employees would stick around for more than a year or two.

Before my father retired, he worked for one company his whole life. It was a large telecom company, and they treated him really well for most of the time he worked for them--great benefits, ample vacation, reasonable wages, lots of training opportunities, and a fantastic stock/retirement program.

For the longest time he couldn't understand why I have worked for so many different companies, until I start explaining that employee loyalty is a thing of the past, and that in fact, being highly skilled, extremely versatile, and having more than 5 years experience in any field is actually seen as a LIABILITY by most corporate employers these days.

The fact that employers are now using social media to spy on their employees is further proof that they view their employees not as creative, participatory human beings, but rather as chattel to be managed, manipulated and disposed of when deemed inconvenient.

Fascism does not start with government and move into the rest of society--it begins with corporate powers, and oozes it's slimy tentacles through the rest of society until it ultimately chokes the life and liberty out of even the best government.

Welcome to NeoSerfdom, children...

Funny.

Fascism does not start with government and move into the rest of society--it begins with corporate powers, and oozes it's slimy tentacles through the rest of society until it ultimately chokes the life and liberty out of even the best government.

Click to expand...

By definition a corporation is fascist and must be to be successful. But, that is a minor detail.

....semi-sentient office supplies,....

Click to expand...

Classic, I'm gunna use that one....me likey that one.

As to that 'using social media to spy on their employees' claptrap. The employees have options that will completely mitigate the intrusion. But, that too is a minor detail.