Agency and communion in LinkedIn professional candidates’ profiles. Bias in recruitment process?

Agency and communion are two content dimensions present of person perception that play a dominant role in making decisions of social nature. Apart from general favourability towards communion when forming judgements about others, people have a tendency to assess more positively persons who reveal stereotypical content categories; men – agency, women – communion. A few research papers offer systematisation of possible biases hiring professionals may exhibit during research and selection (R&S) process and basing the R&S on information found in social media is not immune to those biases. Two experiments with 2 × 2 design (N = 147) were conducted to test whether stereotype-consistent information presented in LinkedIn profiles influences candidates’ assessment. The findings suggest hiring professionals are less biased than lay people and the direction of the observed tendencies is contrary to previously hypothesised.