Could Twitter Predict the Next Great Applicant?

In the days before Paul Ryan was chosen as Romney’s running mate the noise level around Paul Ryan was increasing on Twitter. In an article posted on the ReadWriteWeb entitled “How Twitter Predicted Romney’s VP Choice”  the author, Dave Copeland says “Even as some of the men Mitt Romney considered as a running mate waited for a call from the presumptive Republican presidential candidate, Twitter had already predicted that Paul Ryan would be tapped for the ticket.” How so? According to the article:

“TweetReach, a unit of Internet analytics firm Union Metrics, released data over the weekend suggesting that Twitter was already onto the Romney campaign as early as last Wednesday. The firm tracked what it calls Ryan’s "reach," defined as total number of impressions, tweets about the candidate and the number of unique contributors.  After racking up numbers similar to other likely nominees for the preceding 30 days, Ryan's reach surged as mainstream media outlets and other politically influential Twitter users began to bandy his name about more fervently.”

That got me thinking – what is it about our social media participation that might help us manage and understand our human resources. Could Twitter help predict the next great job candidate? Could social media be used to identify impending employee morale problems? Can we assess a candidate’s social network to determine if they can really do their job? Would social media participation help us figure out the next great salesman? Some people think so.

At Innotrieve we are looking into just these questions. They want to know if our electronic footprint can be used to help predict employee performance, goodness-of-fit, employee engagement, or any other number of critical elements that help make sure both employees and employers are getting the most out of the human resource potential. I was recently asked to help them with their quest. We believe we will be able to see patterns in the social media footprint that can help employees and employers match up better. Both people and companies have personalities and traits that define them. Understanding these traits and mapping them together might help make better matches. So Tweet away – it just might help you and your employer work better together!

Exciting times.