Sharing info on social media leads to hiring bias

Sharing personal information on social media by job seekers may lead to hiring discrimination, a study claims.

A large-scale field experiment conducted by Carnegie Mellon University researchers tested the impact that information posted on a popular social networking site by job candidates can have on employers’ hiring behaviour.

While various surveys have suggested that employers have been using the Web to screen prospective job candidates, there have been no controlled experiments measuring the frequency of firms’ usage of online profiles in hiring decisions and how profile information actually affects those decisions.

“While it appears that a relatively small portion of US employers regularly searches for candidates online, we found robust evidence of discrimination among certain types of employers,” Christina Fong, senior research scientist at CMU’s Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences, said.

Fong and Alessandro Acquisti, associate professor of information technology and public policy at CMU’s H John Heinz III College, used data revealed online by actual members of popular social networking and job-seeking sites to design job resumes and online profiles for their experiments.