Social Profiles more Honest than Resumes, says LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman

LinkedIn Founder Reid Hoffman has opined that candidates are typically more honest in their LinkedIn profile page (and social media profiles in general) than they are when sending their resume in to employers. His logic goes something like this:

Resumes are read by only a handful of people within a given company, and each reader usually has no prior knowledge of the candidate. But on LinkedIn, candidates can have dozens to hundreds of connections who, at least in theory, have personally known or have worked with the candidate.

The main point of Reid’s argument is that it is difficult to publicly lie about credentials and qualifications in front of current and former friends and colleagues. And while social media profiles are not direct replacements for resumes, as the majority of users do not share the same detail as in a resume, they are still useful sources of information for hiring managers looking to verify the veracity of past employment or educational claims. Many hiring experts seem to agree with Hoffman’s assessment and recommend a candidate’s social profiles be quickly accessed to ensure they match the information supplied by a candidate.