Few would argue that assessment and testing has become commonplace in recruitment and selection practices.

A quick Google search will identify a thriving marketplace of online assessments which assess skills, learning capability and personality characteristics. With the click of a few buttons, and entering credit card details everyone in your organisation has the perceived power of analysing people; their strengths and weaknesses, and the person-organisation fit (supported of course by the back end scoring and personalised profile output). From the personality perspective most of these assessments are based on measuring what many psychologists’ agree are the core five personality traits; Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism.

Reliability

However, as with everything that seems too good to be true, the use of online personality profiling does come with its share of criticism. One of the strongest criticisms of personality assessments is their reliability due to the self-report nature. Individuals are given a Likert-scale rating; expected to accurately capture their personality by responding somewhere on a scale between “strongly agree to strongly disagree” with no opportunity to elaborate. For an applicant who assumes that their opportunity for winning a job based on the outcomes of this profile, the process goes something like this:

“Am I talkative? Strongly agree – oh wait, they will think I spend my days gossiping instead of working? Neutral is probably the better answer”. “Am I curious about many things? Hmm, I’m curious about things that are relevant and interesting but don’t get in the weeds of others business unless it’s needed” I guess I Ag… oh this is just too hard”.

The end result is a significant preference for “Neutral” answers and a messy dishevelled candidate furiously googling “leprosy symptoms” as a response to the HIVES outbreak they’ve experienced in response to the testing process (okay, maybe that’s just me but you get my point). At the other end of the spectrum, you get adjusted responses that are selected to reflect the perceived requirements of the job. In both cases, these responses are by people trying to do the right thing but failing under the pressure of personality assessments.

Facebook as an alternative

But does that mean that we shouldn’t use personality tests as part of our recruitment strategy? Or is there an alternative? I will answer the former question later but to the latter question the answer appears to be yes, and that alternative is Facebook.

You probably think that I am crazy or not very ‘interweb savvy’. Surely, when talking about recruitment I actually mean to direct you to LinkedIn, or a similarly geared business platform? The answer is no, I genuinely mean Facebook, and here’s why.

Although there is increased interest in Facebook in the corporate world, the platform is largely geared towards personal networks, or ‘friendships’. In the realm of social media platforms, Facebook is the younger cooler cousin of the ‘substantial’ networks. It is the weekend wear equivalent for the corporate 9-5er, where careful scrutiny and staging to meet expectations or objectives is foregone for a more relaxed approach.

With Facebook, there is significantly less need to go through a 10-point checklist prior to posting (provided you have the appropriate privacy settings of course) because, for many, your network on this site includes people who have known you for years. On Facebook, relationships are two-way and, for the most part, when we post we aren’t often seeking something in return (Selfies are the exception here). We share our views or funny anecdotes usually to bring joy to others, rather than for recognition and reward.

What exactly does this have to do with personality? On the surface a newsfeed full of cat videos may just be perceived to show a love of animals; not a quality that is overly important for most businesses (unless of course you are vehemently opposed to cats). However, according to the research, analysis of our ‘Likes’ on Facebook can provide a detailed measure of our personality across each of the core traits. Furthermore, as the number of ‘Likes’ analysed increases so does the accuracy of the personality profile created, until eventually Facebook can provide a more accurate measure of your personality than a close family member or spouse.

And it’s not ‘Likes’ alone.

The words we use, the frequency of posting and, what we share has all been shown to predict personality traits. In Facebook terms, the “I am talkative” question may be measured by the number of times you engage with people online, or how often you provide updates. “I am open to new experiences” can be measured by the number and type of locations to which you check-in. Want to know about Extraversion? Have a look at the posts of secondary users (the applicant’s friends) in which the primary user is tagged; multiple photos with different groups of people will answer the question here.

In this way Facebook offers something that individual self-report measures can’t, the opportunity to seek others input in an easy, unintimidating way. It presents the opportunity to see a personality as more than a number, and allows participants to show who they are; the black, the white and the grey. In doing so, the risks to recruiters may diminish as they are no longer dependent on the person’s honesty; if self-report is the portrait, Facebook is the panoramic – it gives you more to work with.

But, as the saying goes “if something seems too good to be true, it probably is”…

For the planners amongst us, by now your strategy to integrate Facebook into everyday work life is probably well thought out (can I get away with ‘lounging on a couch, cup of coffee in hand, browsing… I mean analysing… Facebook for hours and calling it work’). But before you start closing down your testing accounts and deliver a well-versed speech to your boss, this approach may not be the Holy Grail it seems and here’s why.

From a research perspective the control used in these studies was a self-report personality assessment; the same type of measure currently used in recruitment by many organisations. Of course, if we are assessing correlation against something that is open to ‘faking’ (or response distortion for the academic purists amongst us), similarities between Facebook profile and self-report may indicate the Facebook profile has been faked too. That said, provided we are talking about a well- established profile with years’ of data, it would take almost super-human skill to curate not only your posts but also those of your ‘friends’ to meet the perceived needs of an opportunity that you are yet to identify and pursue. In addition, researchers have found that Facebook profiles reflect actual rather than ideal personality.

More importantly from a business perspective the use of Facebook, and more broadly social media, as part of recruitment activities is rife with ethical issues and therefore risk.

With just a little research you will unearth a minefield of commentary surrounding how use of social media in recruitment opens up the risk for discrimination. Through viewing these profiles we are provided with information that we would not otherwise ask for (the big three; age, gender, ethnicity). Of course, as professionals we would never intentionally let this information influence our decisions, but unconscious bias in recruitment is real, and social media facilitates this bias through the wealth of information it offers. Team this with the issue of privacy settings, where the only way to access the level of detail required to make an informed decision on personality is through requesting login details from the potential candidate, using Facebook as a personality assessment tool becomes less attractive.

So we shouldn’t use Facebook. Does this mean we should do away with personality assessments completely?

So…what about personality assessments?

Although I hate questions answered with questions as much as the next person, this approach is the most suitable in this scenario because the answer is “Based on your experience, have and/or do personality assessments work for you?”

If the answer is yes, than continue to do what you are doing, at least until there is more research and rigour around the way in which we could use Facebook into the future.

If the answer is no, your options are a little less clear. Of course, you could just stop using them completely, but as a strong believer in workplace culture being the backbone of an organisation I would argue for using anything that can help maintain and cultivate this culture. I also believe personality assessments, when used correctly, ie. as just one of a suite of recruitment tools or activities that help inform a selection decision, can do just that.

So before you ditch personality assessments completely from your repertoire, or invest your attention to looking for an alternative, my suggestion is to engage in exploration to identify exactly what the issue is (note, someone high in Openness would probably love this task). Is it that you are just using personality assessments as a box ticking exercise because your process says to? Is it because you don’t really know what you are looking for and/or what the job needs? Hopefully questions such as these, teamed with some research on best practice use, will start you down the path of identifying how to leverage recruitment personality assessments to really work for you.

Just remember the end goal of personality assessments should not be to achieve an office of Clone Troopers; it’s there to support you in making an informed decision regarding person-organisation fit. And the benefits of these tests definitely outweigh the challenges; personality assessments when done right are a great tool to facilitate improved employee satisfaction and retention, as well as nurturing the corporate culture. As such, before you throw them away make sure that they really cannot work for you.

Now, go grab your coffee, sit on the lounge and engage in some Facebook browsing, for entertainment rather than recruitment purposes…at least for now.