Unlock LinkedIn's secrets to job search success and smarter hiring decisions. Dr. Sébastien Fernandez reveals how your profile could hold the key to your next career move.
EHL’s Dr. Sébastien Fernandez (Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior) teaches courses on Human Behavior and Performance, Emotional Intelligence and People Analytics. Sébastien is interested in helping the hospitality industry harness psychological forces that drive high performance in organizational settings and to make decisions (in areas such as hiring talent) with the help of innovative, evidence-based approaches. His latest research project looks into the role of the professional networking platform, LinkedIn, and how it could unlock the secrets to a more effective strategy in job searching and hiring. The following Q&A looks at the perspective from both job seeker and recruiter, and asks how personality, competencies and job suitability can be decoded from a LinkedIn profile.
My background is in Psychology. I earned my PhD in 2012, specializing in memorization and how people retain raw information – i.e., consistent memory strategies vs. different ones over time. But I like to be versatile in my areas of expertise; for example, I’ve spent years analyzing tipping behavior which is very linked to the hospitality industry and, more recently, I’ve been developing self-assessment metrics to help professors define their teaching style and signature for better learning outcomes.
I’ve always been interested in the subject of personality. How can personality traits be measured and, if so, with which instruments? Is it possible to measure personality using a variety of criteria? How can we communicate our personality via being interviewed and being observed – and conversely, how can a recruiter extract the most pertinent information from conducting interviews and observing a candidate?
When I came across the LinkedIn platform, I was intrigued by how much potentially rich information could be unlocked from someone’s profile. It got me wondering about how these profiles could be decoded to reveal more about the person than first meets the eye. Unlike Facebook, LinkedIn is a professional platform, so if this were possible, LinkedIn could perform a useful additional role in the job seeking and hiring process.
In recent years, many organizations have started using psychometric tests - often criticized for not being totally trustworthy – which motivated me even more to find alternative, measurable and credible ways to gather information from an easily available source.
Back in 2021, I did an initial LinkedIn study (in collaboration with EHL colleagues, Dr. Sowon Kim and Dr. Lohyd Terrier) on personality data collected from first-year bachelor students, with a view to using it for future research. With the students’ agreement, we returned two years after they graduated from EHL, time-lapse of 4/5 years in total, to analyze their LinkedIn profiles - more specifically, to identity and code them as objectively as possible.
We were looking for how many connections had been made, whether they were smiling in their photos or not, as well as their dress code.We defined over 30 additional information indicators, rather like key cues. We saw that many of the indicators corresponded to what we’d imagined, i.e., that LinkedIn profiles could offer valid signals of how creative, conscientious, adaptable and extraverted they were (reflecting four of the five dimensions in the five-factor model of personality).
Interestingly, at the same time, there was another research project underway, stating that LinkedIn didn’t have any impact on job seeking/hiring performance, which I found strange because the researchers were using an overly simplistic list of indicators. With my co-author Nicolas Roulin, we wrote a feedback commentary to give some context to our views, explaining that some cues had already been defined empirically as being related to personality traits which tended to correlate to job performance.
Today, my research is spearheading the most promising links between LinkedIn and the searching/hiring process. In terms of job-hunting, my findings point to the fact that LinkedIn really does have an impact on success rates once the most pertinent profile cues have been properly decoded.
My aim is to develop what was started in 2021, including the identification of new indicators that hadn’t been thought of before. Previously, we had just coded the basic elements of a profile; now we want to see how people interact with the platform, i.e., not just what you present, but also how you make use of LinkedIn over time. How much impact does a more complete profile have? Is it merely a question of weaving in the strategic key words or should more details be included and, if so, which ones?
The objective is also to measure other competencies and personality traits; look for indicators that could reveal more subtle cues, like reasoning skills for example. The idea is to make a definitive link between LinkedIn and personality. Essentially, I’d like to pinpoint the LinkedIn mechanisms that allow for personality to be revealed, and more importantly, the insights needed to spot them. For now, there are some basic traits that are easy to detect, e.g., whether a person is reserved or outgoing, conscientious or less disciplined, but do these observations hold up in more diverse samples?
This research aims to go beyond the usual, basic biographical information and focus more on deciphering the easy-to-miss personality indicators that are actually quite revealing.
Subtle cues refer to the details that we often choose to overlook. For example, the attention paid to the quality of a LinkedIn profile photo – the facial expression, the clothes worn. Linguistically, cues can be picked up from the writing style used to describe oneself: the register, vocabulary and tone. Are the personal details there to inform, or also to engage and influence? How is academic information shared (e.g., are grades listed, are schools included?). The effort put into self-branding and offering a detailed narrative could be seen as an indicator of motivation, confidence and conscientiousness – in brief, a willingness to go the extra mile.
This research has the potential to affect digital recruitment strategies by enabling a more systematic, data-driven approach to evaluating LinkedIn profiles. By identifying key profile indicators (connections, endorsements, activity levels and visual presentation), recruiters can gain deeper insights into the personality traits, skills and behaviors of a potential candidate. I believe that this could help reduce the reliance on subjective impressions which are often biased and misleading, i.e., “I like that candidate because they support the same football team as me.”
The findings could also pave the way for the use of AI tools in recruitment processes, allowing algorithms to analyze LinkedIn profiles for patterns that align with organizational needs. Such tools could highlight candidates’ profesisonal potential based on their interactions and profile details. By refining how LinkedIn is used as a sourcing tool, organizations can expand their talent pools and identify high-potential hires who might otherwise go unnoticed.
Ultimately, this research could guide companies in leveraging LinkedIn as more than just a screening platform, positioning it as a strategic resource for building stronger connections between employers and job seekers, thereby resulting in more successful, long-term hiring outcomes.
At the time of my growing interest, circa 2017, not much research in this area was available since very few papers had been written about LinkedIn’s HR value. Back then, Swiss professor Dr. Nicolas Roulin (now Full Professor of Psychology at St. Mary’s University in Halifax, Canada) had observed that LinkedIn conveyed valuable information about potential candidates if the recruiter was aware of what to look for. For example, he stated that you could detect if a person was an extrovert or an introvert.
Dr. Nicolas Roulin offered to work with me on this project as collaborator and co-author of the papers to come. His role is to offer expertise, since he’s written prolifically on the topic of LinkedIn. Applying for an SNF grant is always a daunting task, so it helps to have a convincing team. I feel that his collaborative role and the potentially wide impact of the findings have been major factors in securing the SNF funding – quite a milestone
The project officially starts in early 2025 and is of a longitudinal nature. The first months will be used to contact participants and code their LinkedIn profiles. First data is due out in summer 2025; this will be the result of the last six months of students’ LinkedIn activity before graduation and the analysis of how the last-year students (soon-to-be-graduates and job seekers) have been representing themselves on the platform. Then, over a two-year period after graduation, we will be observing their LinkedIn profile evolution with the research team asking new questions and adding new findings.
The first challenge for us is now to find a person to help us collect the data and take care of the methodological and administrative aspects of the project. Thanks to the SNF funding, I will be the sole manager of a research assistant hired exclusively for this project (usually at EHL we share the support of the teaching/research assistants).
The second challenge will be finding participants. Due to the long duration of the study and the types of analyses, we would like approximately 1000 young people to join the study, ideally from the various business schools of Switzerland (either Universities or Applied Universities).
The third challenge will be about the communication and implementation of findings. Our study might reveal that job seekers who have more complete profiles do not necessarily land in better jobs than those who have less information in their profiles, or it might reveal that unexpected LinkedIn indicators are good proxies of job seekers’ competences. If the findings are not supportive of people’s pre-existing beliefs, it might be difficult for the study to have an impact on people’s actions.
The first thing to mention is that these findings intend to be applicable across industries, i.e., not just hospitality-specific. Today, it is very common for recruiters to screen LinkedIn profiles. Each recruiter looks for what they need, but in the end, the majority of them tend to be very subjective – in other words, biases continue to overshadow facts. For this reason, I’d really like my research to be about developing a more objective lens for both candidates and recruiters.
Clearly, the aim is to facilitate the lives of candidates, recruiters and HR departments. For the job seekers, I hope these research findings will offer solid recommendations on how to transmit key information, get seen and find a well-fitting job. For the recruiters (managers and HR), I trust we’ll have built an impactful methodology to be used in parallel with other recruitment approaches, resulting in better informed decisions made during the hiring process.
Let’s get into the habit of making data-driven decisions when it comes to job-hunting and recruiting – surely well-made decisions will result in greater job satisfaction and longevity in the role!