Examining the Influence of Personality and Multimodal Behavior on Hireability Impressions

Abstract

While personality traits have been traditionally modeled as behavioral constructs, we novelly posit job hireability as a personality construct. To this end, we examine correlates among personality and hireability measures on the First Impressions Candidate Screening dataset. Modeling hireability as both a discrete and continuous variable, and the big-five OCEAN personality traits as predictors, we utilize (a) multimodal behavioral cues, and (b) personality trait estimates obtained via these cues for hireability prediction (HP). For each of the text, audio and visual modalities, HP via (b) is found to be more effective than (a). Also, superior results are achieved when hireability is modeled as a continuous rather than a categorical variable. Interestingly, eye and bodily visual cues perform comparably to facial cues for predicting personality and hireability. Explanatory analyses reveal that multimodal behaviors impact personality and hireability impressions: e.g., Conscientiousness impressions are impacted by the use of positive adjectives (verbal behavior) and eye movements (non-verbal behavior), confirming prior observations.