Imagine you are trying to fill a sales position and looking for someone who is outgoing, comfortable around people, and the life of the party. Sure, in the interview, you’ll be able to get a sense of how cordial someone is, but you have ten applications on your desk, and you are only able to interview two of them.
One possible solution is using Facebook. This is because researchers (Quercia et al., 2012) found that extraversion predicts the number of social contacts on the social networking site as well as the number of friends in the real world. Thus, if one candidate has 30 social contacts and the other has 900, the latter would have a higher likelihood of being extraverted.
To find this result, the investigators calculated the number of social contacts and personality – as measured by an online application called myPersonality – of 172,952 Facebook users.
Quercia, D., Lambiotte, R., Stillwell, D., Kosinski, M., & Crowcroft, J. (2012). Proceedings of Association for Computing Machinery Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work: The personality of popular Facebook users. Seattle, WA.
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