Those Pictures Of You Carousing With Your Friends On Facebook Could Actually Help You Get A Job

Worried that a potential employer is somehow checking out your Facebook profile and seeing photos of the time that made you swear never to drink tequila on an empty stomach ever again? Don’t be! A new study says your profile could be closely linked to job performance, and those boozy pics just make you look friendly and extroverted.

The Wall Street Journal cites a study from Northern Illinois University, the University of Evansville and Auburn University that researched how job performance is linked to Facebook profiles.

Raters perused profiles of 56 college students with jobs, looking at photos, wall posts, comments, education and hobbies, and then answered questions about the people they’d looked at. Then they were asked things like, “Is this person dependable?” and “How emotionally stable is this person?”

After six months, researchers totted up the ratings against those students’ employee evaluations, and found that there were strong links between things like job performance and how their profiles had scored for conscientiousness, agreeability and intellectual curiosity.

Those who had traveled, had tons of friends and a wide variety of hobbies were rated well, and the aforementioned partying photos just made raters see those people as friendly and good in a crowd.

The lead researcher says that Facebook could be used in job-screening, since candidates aren’t about to fake their profiles in front of their friends, even if they do really want a job. So don’t hold back on those tequila pics, put’em aaalll out there.

Facebook Profiles Found to Predict Job Performance [Wall Street Journal]

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