Might an analyse of social media use and connections help employers find the right employee? New work in the International Journal of Business Information Systems, has used association rule mining to analyse job seekers’ profiles and activity on Facebook to determine personality traits that might be matched to a given job by a putative employer.
An international team of researchers from Finland, Ghana, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Sweden, and the USA explains how personality traits play a significant part in the suitability of an employee for a particular role. They suggest how Facebook use might be analysed to help match unemployed users of the social networking site with an appropriate job. The team looked at data from 3000 unemployed Facebook users in Nigeria. Association rule mining allowed them to extract useful information and identify interesting characteristics and traits that might otherwise remain hidden or not be discernible from a job seeker’s application form or resume. The team focused on a particular sector, that which employs public relations officers (PROs), marketers, and advertisers.
The team discusses earlier work from Italy that used an alternative approach to profiling unemployed Facebook users there. They now write that “Much research has been done in the area of Web usage clustering, with the issues involved in data mining for extraction of web navigation patterns, ordering relationships, prediction of web surfing behaviour, and clustering of web user sessions based on weblogs.” Nigeria is one of the biggest users of Facebook in Africa, however, and so should provide useful information above and beyond what might be gleaned from web use.
The team demonstrated that sentences and phrases used on the social networking site can reveal correlations with particular personality traits such as conscientiousness and agreeability. Given that employers commonly look to social media as a pre-selection tool before calling prospective job candidates to interview, the development of an analytical approach that might improve and validate this screening approach could be very welcome among human resource managers and recruiters. Moreover, there has been a degree of stagnation in the rising employment rates in many developing nations, such as Nigeria, new tools to help remedy this, COVID-19 impact notwithstanding, are urgently needed
Olaleye, S.A., Ukpabi, D.C., Olawumi, O., Atsa’am, D.D., Agjei, R.O., Oyelere, S.S., Sanusi, I.T., Agbo, F.J., Balogun, O.S., Gbadegeshin, S.A., Adegbite, A. and Kolog, E.A. (2022) ‘Association rule mining for job seekers’ profiles based on personality traits and Facebook usage’, Int. J. Business Information Systems, Vol. 40, No. 3, pp.299–326.
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