Your Facebook Profile Can Predict Job Performance, Study Says

You always carry that fear that a picture of you doing a keg stand in college or showing your goods to the camera at a Mardi Gras parade will find its way to Facebook, keeping you from landing that dream job. But those fears might not be so farfetched. A new study finds that it can take just 10 minutes for someone to scan your profile and predict how you'll perform in the workplace.

Called "I Just Work Here," the study will soon be published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology.

Researchers asked a college professor and a pair of students to review Facebook profiles of employed college students. Afterwards, they answered various personality questions about the subjects, such as how trustworthy they were or how well they get along with others. They browsed a total of 274 profiles for about five to 10 minutes each.

Six months later, the researchers got performance reviews from about a quarter of the subjects' employers. The results showed that Facebook profiles were overwhelmingly accurate at predicting success – much better than even standard personality tests.

"I think one of the differences is that you change the frame of reference," lead researcher and Northern Illinois University management professor Donald Kluemper told the Baltimore Sun. "You're asking the rater, 'is this person a hard worker?' On a personality test, the employee would be asked, 'How hard a worker are you?' One of the criticisms of self-reporting personality testing is that it can be faked. On a Facebook page, that's a lot harder to do."

But Kluemper said head hunters can't just start turning to Facebook to fill open positions because a number of legal issues must be taken into account.

"Every question that you can't ask in a job interview is on Facebook," he said.

Several Facebook studies have been making the rounds recently. Earlier this month, a University of Chicago study claimed that . Another from researchers at the University of Milan and MIT found that there is a : people exhibit physical and psychophysiological responses when they log onto the site, similar to the satisfaction experienced by people when they play an instrument or engage in some kind of creative activity.