Social Media and Political Affiliation: How Expressing Hot-Button Opinions Affects Raters’ Assessments of Job Applicants

People post their views on hot-button issues (such as immigration) on social media platforms. In contrast to traditional environments—in which equivalent disclosures would typically be verbal, face-to-face, unrecorded, ephemeral, and addressed to known audiences—social media platforms allow for written, technology-mediated, recorded, and enduring archives of posts that can be viewed by a vast audience, much of which could be unknown to the poster. The relative permanence of social media disclosures has enabled hiring managers not only to view posters’ personal stances on hot-button issues but also to use those views to inform their decisions about the posters’ job applications. To understand how social media posts shape hiring decisions, we investigate how and where (i.e., on which social media platform) viewing posts about a hot-button political issue affects hiring managers’ evaluations of a poster’s hireability. To do so, we constructed a realistic online experiment in which we asked 377 working professionals to assess the hireability of entry-level job applicants. Our results show that viewing applicants’ social media posts about immigration, a hot-button issue, influences decision makers’ ratings of similarity and liking and their judgments of hireability. We also find that the influence of viewing such content overshadows the influence of job-relevant information (e.g., an internship) on hiring managers’ assessments of hireability, which suggests that social media introduces new, influential forms of information into decision making. The platform on which the social media posts appeared (i.e., Facebook or Twitter) did not moderate the influence of viewing the posts on hiring decisions, suggesting hedonic platform generalizability. We explore these findings with a qualitative applicability check conducted using insights drawn from 79 hiring professionals. Taken together, our findings suggest that social media posts about hot-button issues impact hiring managers’ assessments of the hireability of applicants regardless of the platform on which the posts appear. Based on our findings, we outline several practical applications for hiring managers and future directions for academic research.