Other things a prospective employer might be able to glean from your Facebook profile is openness to new experiences (vacation pictures from a glacier off New Zealand), emotional stability (are your friends constantly offering you words of comfort?) and agreeableness (are you constantly arguing with "friends?")- suggest the researchers.
And if you are smugly thinking to yourself, "I've carefully wiped my Facebook page of any incriminating photos, comments and wall posts," - well, it turns out you may still not have hidden your true nature from future employers: On a rating scale that examines key personality attributes that indicate future job success, you might get rated high in conscientiousness and possibly low on extroversion explains researchers.

Study
Researchers conducted series of two studies, at Northern Illinois University, the University of Evansville and Auburn University. As a part of study six people with experience in human resources were asked to rate a sample of 500 people in terms of key personality traits using only the sample group's Facebook pages as a guideline.
The person who did the rating were told to spend roughly five to 10 minutes with each person's Facebook page, and work on the project for no longer than one and a half hours per day to avoid fatigue. They were asked to rate members of the sample group on what is known as the "Big Five" personality traits, which includes extroversion, conscientiousness, emotional stability, agreeableness and openness to new experiences. High scores on these traits are generally accepted by human resources managers as an indication of future good job performance.
Members of the sample group were asked to give a self-evaluation and took an IQ test. In one study, researchers followed up with the employers of people in the sample group six months after their personality traits were rated, to ask questions about job performance.

Findings
The researchers found that the people who were rating, had a common agreement about the personality traits expressed in the sample group's Facebook page, and that their ratings correlated strongly with self-rated personality traits. More importantly, they also found that the Facebook ratings were a more accurate way of predicting a person's job performance than an IQ test.
Although the study does suggest that looking at a job applicant's Facebook page can prove useful for employers, Donald Kluemper, the lead researcher on the study, said employers need to tread carefully here. however, it had been found in the study conducted by media service Reppler that 90 percent of recruiters and hiring managers look at an applicant’s Facebook page whether they should or not

Researcher’s view
"This was an effort to provide some evidence that checking on a person's Facebook page might be valuable and might be useful," Kluemper said. "But I wouldn't go so far as to say that one study should be used as a reason to start using Face book in hiring.

"Any other selection tool that is out there has been studied hundreds of thousands of times. Basically, there needs to be a lot more work done in this area."

(c)2012 the Los Angeles Times 
Distributed by MCT Information Services

News source:http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-03-facebook-profile-iq-job.html