With so many people leaving a job within the first six months of starting, the problem of poor job matching is a chronic waste of time, energy and resources. New research from the University of Melbourne suggests we can better find our dream job if we understand the ‘hidden personality’ of various roles, and therefore better match those with job seekers.
“It’s long been believed that different personalities align better with different jobs,” the researchers explain. “For example, sales roles might better suit an extraverted individual, whereas a librarian role might better suit an introverted individual. But studies have been small-scale in nature. Never before has there been such large-scale evidence of the distinctive personality profiles that occur across occupations.”
The personality of jobs
The researchers examined nearly 130,000 Twitter users who represented around 3,500 different occupations to try and determine the personality profile for those occupations across the big five personality traits of conscientiousness, openness to experience, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.
The analysis found that a good many jobs appeared to group together around certain personality traits. For instance, one such cluster seemed to consist of the various computer-related jobs, including software developers and web designers.
From this, the team utilized AI to create a ‘vocation compass’, which is basically a recommendation engine to try and match people to jobs based upon their personality. It’s a system that was able to successfully recommend people to a profession around 70% of the time.
“Even when the system was wrong it was not too far off, pointing to professions with very similar skill sets,” the researchers contend. “For instance, it might suggest a poet becomes a fictional writer, not a petrochemical engineer.”
Job alignment
The researchers believe that a good job fit is crucial to our wellbeing, as we spend so much of our time at work. They believe that trawling social media and the digital exhaust we leave behind us provides an opportunity to accurately match our personality to the right job with a high degree of accuracy.
They drawl parallels with finding a good romantic partner, and the way so many now turn to AI-based dating services to help them do that. They argue that our current careers advice often provides an overly simplified view of careers.
“What if instead – as our new vocation map shows – the truth was closer to dating, where there are in fact a number of roles ideally suited for everyone?,” they say. “By better understanding the personality dimensions of different jobs we can find more perfect matches.”
The research utilized data from Twitter for their analysis, but the authors believe that other data sources could provide equally effective matching. Indeed, a richer data set could provide more accurate services to job seekers.
“Our analytic approach potentially provides an alternative for identifying occupations which might interest a person, as opposed to relying upon extensive self-report assessments,” the researchers conclude. “We have created the first, detailed and evidence based multidimensional universe of the personality of careers – like the map makers of the 19th century we can always improve and evolve this over time.”
