Option A: Professional Profile Guidelines and Rubrics

When developing a professional profile, there are certain guidelines you should follow to show yourself in the most flattering and professional light. Your profile should highlight your skills and professionalism to current and future employers.

Employers often look at profiles to better understand a candidate. You should include important elements, but also think about the quality of each thing you include in a profile. Although employers may not actually score profiles, they do establish criteria to evaluate each one. For our class, we want to get specific and allow you to check for the right things as well as the degree to which you accomplish those. While learning, it helps to look at examples of profiles or your own profile and actually rate them. So after the guidelines below, you’ll find actual scoring rubrics to use to evaluate the sample profiles. Imagine you are a hiring manager looking at these profiles to make a recommendation on whether to employ a candidate.

Professional Profiles should include the following:

Content

Appropriate personal content (not over sharing personal details or giving too much family info)

Limited to professional content (not hobbies, trips unless they support your profession)

Appropriate grammar and mechanics (may use Grammarly to help)

Resume

Appropriate length for profession

Correct dates (No overlap and any gaps explained)

Includes enough detail to explain job tasks/responsibilities/projects

Visuals

Visually pleasing (Not overly busy/visually noisy)

Looks organized and can be easily read

Includes profile photo that demonstrates professionalism

If possible, includes an “action” picture from on the job or completing appropriate tasks that support the resume or objective for a new position.

Rubric to Evaluate a Candidate using their Professional Profile

Sample profiles can be found under the Media area of the Week 5 Resources page. Use this rubric to evaluate the candidates and then follow the directions on the instructions page to type up your review, including:

Critiques of at least 2 of the sample online profiles

Use the rubric to give scores AND explain the scoring

Explain your rationale about your recommendation on whether to hire or not hire this candidate in a 1- to 2-page review and critique of the profiles and recommendations for improvement from the viewpoint of a hiring manager.

Please Note: YOUR assignment will be graded using the standard Assignment rubric for our class. The Rubric below is for your use on the sample profiles and in developing your submission.

Candidate Name:

Points

Scale

Points Earned

Overall feel of Profile:
· Shows interest in field
· Demonstrates a sense of being a good employee
· Is professional
· Doesn’t include too much personal stuff or controversial material
· This is sort of putting a score on your “gut instinct” from viewing the profile and whether you would hire the candidate (be cautious of unintentional bias here)

0 – 20

Resume:
· Has work history, education, and other appropriate content.
· Is updated, relevant, and persuasive.
· Appropriate length
· Correct dates- no gaps
· Detail for job tasks/responsibilities

0 – 20

Content:
· Demonstrates an understanding of a portfolio and contains appropriate content.
· Contains content that reveals aspirations and professional competencies of the author.
· Overall impression is welcoming for a prospective employer.

0 – 20

Visual Aspects:
· The use of images enhances the content.
· Professional + professional “action” shots if possible
· Not too busy or visually noisy
· The visual material creates an additional layer of information for the reader.

0 – 15

Professional Presentation:
· Correct spelling, punctuation, and grammar throughout.
· Well-organized, easy to read, enjoyable.

0 – 15

Total:

90

Will Your Facebook Profile Sabotage Your Job Search? 

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Section:

Career Strategies

Keywords: career strategies; careers & workplace; facebook

Philip Roth

College of St Mary

Facebook, Twitter and their ilk are digital catnip for hiring managers, but this addiction isn’t a harmless buzz: New research shows that what’s in our profiles has little bearing on how well we do our jobs, even though a large number of recruiters operate under the assumption that it does.

Social media? Everybody’s doing it — everybody in HR, that is. According to one survey by recruiting software company Jobvite, 93% of recruiters surveyed are likely to look at a candidate’s profile in the course of filling a job. More than 40% have reconsidered a job candidate based on what was in a social media profile, and 60% say improper grammar or punctuation, along with four-letter words, make them think poorly of the applicant.

When it comes to profiles and performance, “For some reason, there’s this impetus to think it’s related,” says Philip Roth, professor of management at Clemson University. “Companies are inspecting social profiles to weed out candidates and to get a sense of whether a particular applicant is likely to fit into the culture or not. What you post or Tweet can have positive or negative impact on what recruiters think of you,” Dan Schawbel wrote in TIME last year.

“To me the complications that go with that logic are pretty substantial,” Roth says.

The temptation of using sites like Facebook to take a peek at what job-seekers say and do when they’re off the clock is its accessibility and the sense that it offers a real-life window into someone’s unguarded thoughts. “It’s easy,” Roth says. “The information is just too alluring.”

The trend and the assumption of a correlation between what people display online and what kind of behaviors they display in the workplace also can be ascribed to a misplaced faith in the power of technology to provide better insights than the low-tech methods that preceded it, Roth says.

“People also look at this through a technological lens — technology is good, we’ll try it — but if you look at it as an employment test it ought to have a proven record of predicting job performance,” he says. “If it works you ought to have a track record that it works. The track record for social media isn’t there.”

(MORE: The Real Reason New College Grads Can’t Get Hired)

In a new Journal of Management article, Roth found that although there’s plenty of information that shows how much social media is used in hiring, there’s a dearth of research on how well it’s being used. Employers are forging ahead and relying on the assumption that a job candidate whose Facebook profile is full of hard-partying photos and devoid of capital letters and commas, for instance, won’t be a good worker.

This assumption is actually dead wrong. In another Journal of Management paper, Roth and lead author Chad Van Iddekinge of Florida State University couldn’t find any link between subjects’ current job performance and what kind of employees recruiters thought these people would be based on evaluations of their Facebook pages. “We had recruiters make predictions and the empirical correlation was essentially zero,” Roth says.

Part of the problem is that there’s really no standard for how to evaluate a Facebook page this way, so HR folks wind up guessing or going with their gut — not a reliable way to assess jobworthiness. Taking what users post on Facebook at face value is a gamble, too — anyone with a Facebook friend who’s prone to embellishing the truth (which is probably most of us) knows that.

There are other reasons why relying on social media as a kind of ad hoc screening tool isn’t a good hiring strategy.

“There was evidence of subgroup difference in Facebook ratings that tended to favor female and White applicants,” Van Iddekinge and Roth write.

The authors theorize that the overwhelming amount of personal detail in Facebook profiles “may cause decision makers to rely on biases” as they try to sort out what’s relevant and what isn’t. Roth says using profile content to predict job performance is similar to some employers’ use of credit checks, a practice that’s been banned in some states.

Roth points out that photos and “likes” can give clues to applicants’ race, religion and other classes protected from workplace discrimination. He also says it potentially could skew the playing field either for or against older candidates, who are less likely to be active on social media sites.

Sites like Facebook are a great way for people to put their personality on display, but hiring managers are making a big mistake when they evaluate the profile rather than the person.

~~~~~~~~

By Martha C. White

©TIME USA, LLC 2013. All rights reserved. No part of this material may be duplicated or redisseminated without permission.

References

White, M. C. (2013). Will Your Facebook Profile Sabotage Your Job Search? Time.Com, 1. Retrieved from https://search-ebscohost-com.ezp.waldenulibrary.org/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=91976641&site=ehost-live&scope=site

Assignment 1: Put Your Best Profile Forward

A social media profile stands in your place to anyone who reads it. Profiles can serve any purposes; some help you catch up with friends and share information with your family. Others, however, represent you to a network of professionals, and this could hurt or hinder your career path. Today human resource professional use more  than your resume to determine how well you will fit into their company culture; it is becoming routine to complete an online search of applicants, as well. Most of us have an online presence-sometimes created by others, like your company’s website or being mentioned in a newspaper or school newsletter. There is little you can do about how you are represented by others. But you have control over how you present yourself. Who are people seeing when they are looking at your profile online?

For this Assignment you will learn to review online social media profiles and how the content of profiles can impact your professional future. You may either evaluate the sample profile or create your own professional online profile.

To prepare for the Assignment:

• Read the White article, ‘Will your Facebook profile sabotage your job search?’, in this week’s Notes and Readings.

• Consider your online search of yourself from this week’s Discussion.

• Evaluate the Professional Profiles media for examples of professional profiles.

• Review Walden University privacy guidelines to understand online policies at Walden.

Assignment Instructions:

Complete EITHER Option A or Option B.

Option A. Evaluate Sample Profiles

You will review sample student profiles, evaluate and make recommendations for improving them.

• Review and critique at least two of the sample online profiles using the ‘Professional Profile Guidelines and Rubric document-Option A’ that can be found in this week’s Learning Resources.

• Explain in detail your scoring for both profiles

By Day 7

Submit a 1- to 2-page essay review and critique of the profiles. If you were the hiring manager who reviewed these two profiles, would you hire the candidates? Why or why not? Make sure to reference the scoring rubric in the Professional Profile Guidelines and Rubric document and to make specific recommendations about how the profiles could be improved.