Professional vs. Personal-Oriented Self-Disclosure on LinkedIn: The Impact of Gender and Occupation on Recruiters’ Recommendation for Interview

Abstract

Social networking sites (SNSs) have become established arenas for many forms of social interaction. Recruitment and selection of job candidates using SNSs is a current trend that we are yet to understand the potential consequences of. The purpose of this study was to examine whether there is a difference between professional-oriented and personal-oriented self-disclosure on LinkedIn profiles in predicting recruiter’s recommendation for interview, with the impact of occupation and gender. We created LinkedIn profiles that varied in regards to 1) type of self-disclosure (personal-, professional-oriented), 2) occupation (accountant, marketing coordinator), and 3) gender (male, female). The study was conducted as an online survey where respondents with recruitment experience or education related to recruitment participated by making their candidate evaluations based on general job descriptions for both occupations. We found that it is more beneficial for accountants to have a professional-oriented type of selfdisclosure on LinkedIn than for marketing coordinators, and that recruiters’ recommendation for interview is higher for female accountants with professionaloriented self-disclosure than for female accountants with personal-oriented selfdisclosure. The same difference does not apply for male accountants. The results indicate that norms and biases related to gender and occupation, and how LinkedIn users disclose their profile information can lead to biased recruiter decisions when LinkedIn is the platform for candidate assessment. This knowledge could imply the need for implicit bias training and generally higher awareness around such unconscious mental processes when using SNSs in recruitment processes.