rESSuME: employability skills social media survey

Abstract

Purpose: This paper presents rESSuME: Employability Skills Social Media SurvEy, which is a tool developed to understand if and how employers screen candidates’ social media (SM) to identify personal employability attributes. In doing so, the purpose of this paper is to shed light into the potential mismatch between the personal purpose of SM and recruiters’ job-related use of this data.

Design/methodology/approach: rESSuME maps personal employability attributes to elements of Facebook (FB). It was delivered to 708 employers in the UK and the USA. The 415 completed surveys were statically analysed.

Findings: More than 75 per cent of those surveyed use FB to screen most candidates. Loyalty and reliability are the personal attributes employers most search for. They look for personal attributes examining posts, comments and photos. Country and gender differences are also reported. While in the USA, they focus on determining whether candidates have good appearance, in the UK they are more interested in gauging if candidates are reliable. Females are more concerned with establishing whether candidates display common sense than their male counterpart.

Originality/value: This work is the first to articulate a rationale and systematic approach to screen candidates’ SMPs to: identify personal employability attributes and systematically map personal attributes to features of FB. Thus, it contributes a novel, systematic and structured tool to do so: rESSuME. It is the largest study with recruiters to date and the first to provide empirical evidence on how candidates’ SMPs are screened: what personal employability attributes do recruiters looked for in SMPs; and what sections and features of FB do recruiters looked at to identify the candidates’ personal employability attributes.