Characterizing Hirability via Personality and Behavior
This work addresses job candidate screening for HR applications, but it is incremental as it builds on existing personality and hirability modeling with a novel two-step approach.
The paper tackled the problem of predicting job hirability by modeling it as a personality construct using multimodal behavioral cues, achieving superior results with a two-step process that first estimates personality from audio, visual, and textual data and then predicts hirability, particularly when hirability is treated as a continuous variable.
While personality traits have been extensively modeled as behavioral constructs, we model \textbf{\textit{job hirability}} as a \emph{personality construct}. On the {\emph{First Impressions Candidate Screening}} (FICS) dataset, we examine relationships among personality and hirability measures. Modeling hirability as a discrete/continuous variable with the \emph{big-five} personality traits as predictors, we utilize (a) apparent personality annotations, and (b) personality estimates obtained via audio, visual and textual cues for hirability prediction (HP). We also examine the efficacy of a two-step HP process involving (1) personality estimation from multimodal behavioral cues, followed by (2) HP from personality estimates. Interesting results from experiments performed on $\approx$~5000 FICS videos are as follows. (1) For each of the \emph{text}, \emph{audio} and \emph{visual} modalities, HP via the above two-step process is more effective than directly predicting from behavioral cues. Superior results are achieved when hirability is modeled as a continuous vis-á-vis categorical variable. (2) Among visual cues, eye and bodily information achieve performance comparable to face cues for predicting personality and hirability. (3) Explanatory analyses reveal the impact of multimodal behavior on personality impressions; \eg, Conscientiousness impressions are impacted by the use of \emph{cuss words} (verbal behavior), and \emph{eye movements} (non-verbal behavior), confirming prior observations.