I recently came across a very well-penned article by Wired’s Seth Stevenson regarding Klout;
an online service that measures your influence in the social media realm. In a
very cursory summary; it works via a metrics-measuring algorithm developed to
track how many times your tweets, Facebook posts and various other iterations
of social media are passed along to followers, as well as by who retweets them
and how much influence your overall network of people commands.
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| What does your Klout score say about you professionally? |
Stevenson discusses the potential perks and pitfalls of the service. I am not going to go into further explanation, as I am more interested in the comments following the article and in the story of Sam Fiorella, a Canadian interactive marketing executive, who was allegedly passed over for a job because his Klout score was too low.
In a social business marketing arena, I can understand that
an employer may want to take a quick look at a score or how many people follow
you. I’ve even had a former colleague tell me that he found it preposterous that
a social media consultant would ever approach his company with only three
recommendations on LinkedIn. However, to discount Fiorella’s 20 years of
experience in favor of a number generated by a proprietary algorithm (meaning we’ll
never know exactly what data it’s crunching) is absolutely ridiculous (and
perhaps illegal?).
Background checks on potential employees are common but
constrained to specific instances to protect people from discrimination (in the
US). For instance, a negative FICO score could possibly tell you whether or not
to give an employee the keys to the corporate coffer. A positive drug screen
might reveal that a candidate is not the prime choice for a heavy equipment
operator position.
Even if a background check comes back with a negative
result, you must give the candidate an opportunity to explain the circumstances
(and/or individualized analysis) and cannot discount them based solely on criteria
such as these.
The Klout story is tricky because frankly, there are no EEOC
regulations specifically referencing: ‘We’re sorry…love your experience, you’re
the top candidate, a great leader, but we’re passing. You don’t have enough
Klout.’
Some of the comments regarding Fiorella’s journey we’re
insightful. The overwhelming sentiment was that Klout has no clout, especially
when it comes to hiring decisions. One commenter said they would check Klout
scores and immediately disqualify anyone with a score higher than theirs
because it meant they were on social media too much. There were also a few adopters
and purveyors of this type of media service lauding the insight it could have
for marketers, in building brands, and yes; even hiring.
The idea that there are people out there who think Klout
could provide any insight as to whether or not to hire someone for an
executive-level job, or any job, for that matter is troubling. There are those
who might say Fiorella was in social business marketing, his score should have
been high, and he should have known that Klout existed. Possibly a valid point;
if he thought it was a relevant medium for his type of clients.
It’s not just marketers. Say you’re applying for a sous chef
position. The head chef uses Klout personally to monitor her Klout and how
popular her foodie blog is becoming. Out of curiosity she checks your score.
She finds out your involved in a controversial organization that does not match
her views or, even worse, those of the restaurant owner. Or what if she finds something
that could violate EEOC mandates about your sexuality, or that, even though you
look 28, you’re really approaching 50, and wouldn’t likely be able to handle
taking orders from her; a 30 year old.
EEOC regulations are intended to prevent discrimination
based on ethnicity, sex, convictions and more. Information found on social media
and ranking services have the potential to be in direct conflict with these
rules.
Last year, Advertising
Age published an infographic on social
media demographics for several services that influence on your Klout score.
At that time, nearly two-thirds of Twitter users were white and nearly the same
ratio women. Couldn’t using a Klout score at all in hiring decisions, based on
these ratios alone, have the potential to be discriminatory? It would be
interesting to see the demographic breakdown of the top ‘influencers’.
I know it’s a stretch, but the idea of giving any credence
to this type of score in hiring decisions seems ludicrous. (Unless of course
you want to hire Ludacris
to be your next spokesperson.)
If you are connected to any form of social media, your data
is out there and people are using it and manipulating it in every conceivable
way to make it sellable. Unfortunately, it can also be used to judge you as a
job candidate, which opens up a host of new questions for HR folks to handle.
We stand on the edge
of a ‘Jumping
the Shark’ moment, possibly for all forms of social media. Users are catching
on to the ramifications of posting too much information. Services such as
Klout, being that their data relevance has already been called into question by
many, run the risk of becoming irrelevant as users tend to shy away.
I am very interested in hearing about how much
clout you give Klout.
