Facebook More Telling for Job Prospects Than IQ

Your Facebook page is a better gauge of the kind of worker you'll become than is your IQ, researchers say.

Even pictures of you partying are OK, they found.

What you post to Facebook, and how you interact while there, offer a better prediction about future job performance than does IQ. And your user profile shows an employer how conscientious, curious and agreeable you are, concluded researchers in a study published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology.

In one experiment, a college professor joined two students and rated Facebook profiles of college students. The trio spent 10 minutes on each profile and assessed each person with a series of questions.

Six months later, it turns out the raters predicted employee evaluations better than IQ would. Facebook profiles ranked better for students who traveled, pursued hobbies outside of school and had more friends.

Contrary to popular notions, partying photos posted on the social networking site didn't count against students, the researchers found.

In five or 10 minutes, our raters could look at the tone of a subject's wall post, note the number of friends they have, peruse their photos to see how social they were and assess their tastes in books and music, Don Kluemper, lead study author and professor of management at North Illinois University, told NIU Today. It's a very rich source of information.

However, Britain's Guardian newspaper warned against such potentially simplistic views of employees.

Ultimately, social networking sites are just that -- social, Catherine Noonan wrote on the paper's Blogging Students. So why not steer clear of Facebook and assess candidates the tried-and-tested way: on how they come across in a professional context.

--