Work-related social networks (such as LinkedIn) are often used by recruiters to find new employees because it contains information about education or work experience. But can you also deduce someone's personality from it? This has been investigated in the soon to be published study 'Personality Perception Based on LinkedIn Profiles' by the University of Tilburg. It emerged that this is especially true for extroversion and self-presentation. This does not seem to be possible for other personality traits.
The researchers came to this conclusion after asking groups of raters to estimate the personality of 275 people based on their LinkedIn profile. They then compared these estimates with the results of the personality tests they had administered to the owners of the profiles. Niels van de Ven (Tilburg University):“We believe that purely on the basis of a LinkedIn profile you can fairly accurately estimate someone's extroversion and also how good someone is at self-presentation. But it's actually just as important that for character traits like how precise, creative, nice, or emotionally stable someone is, we can't predict this.”
Co-author Alec Serlie (GITP):“We already knew that you can predict someone's personality based on a Facebook profile. But those profiles contain a lot of interaction with other people and are made much less aware than with LinkedIn. That is why it is an important question for recruiters whether LinkedIn also “leaks” this kind of personality information, and that appears to be the case for some character traits.”
