If you're not tweeting, you're not getting hired anytime soon. That's the anecdotal message of a new feature story in Wired that strips down Klout, the San Francisco startup that measures people's online "influence" with a proprietary algorithm that crunches user data from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social platforms to sum up a person's social worth with a score from 0 to 100.
Wired's Seth Stevenson managed to find a few folks who claim, pretty disturbingly, that they were turned down for jobs despite being eminently qualified because their Klout scores were too low. For quick reference, Justin Bieber, with 18 million Twitter followers, has a perfect Klout score of 100, ubiquitous tech evangelist Robert Scoble's comes in at a very influential 85, and Ron Conway, for all his mindshare mojo as a Silicon Valley angel investor, scores a mere 48—just a point higher than the Aflac duck.
It seems shocking that any company would weigh job candidates using a metric that rates the social networking influence of a guy who actually helped get Facebook and Twitter off the ground as roughly equivalent to that of an insurance company's mascot. But that's what veteran branding consultant Sam Fiorella told Stevenson had happened to him when he was up for an executive position at a "large Toronto marketing agency" in the spring of 2011.
Fiorella claimed his not-very-influential-at-all Klout score of 34 doomed his candidacy. And that's not just guesswork on his part—the agency's recruiter pulled up Fiorella's score in his presence and "cut the interview short pretty soon after that," he said. The job eventually went to a candidate with a Klout score of 67.
Of course, one murky tale does not necessarily reflect a wider trend. Fiorella said he spent the six months following that eye-opening interview furiously trying to boost his Klout score (it's now at 72, Wired reports, so take that, large-Toronto-marketing-agency veep with your measly sub-70 Klout score).
The lesson from the interview was that "[f]ifteen years of accomplishments weren't as important as that score," Fiorella told the tech journal.
But was that really the case?
Stevenson doesn't get verification from the unnamed marketing agency that this is what happened. It's not difficult to recall the spring of 2011 as a fairly tight labor market. And isn't it possible that a marketing firm looking to fill an influencer position like brand management might use a Klout score as a tiebreaker between two equally qualified candidates?
If so, then the takeaway would be that it's probably a good idea for people looking for work as mavens to nurture their Klout score. Not that there are companies out there prepared to hire the Aflac duck to manage their brand over a guy like the pre-Klouted-up Fiorella (who happily reported that he's been getting more job offers since boosting his score).
Where Wired provides a lot more credible evidence that Klout is starting to "infiltrate more and more of our everyday transactions" is in the service's use by the retail and hospitality industries. Stevenson reports that last summer, registration desk clerks at the Palms Casino Resort in Las Vegas were looking up guests' Klout scores at check-in. Those with robust scores were offered room upgrades without any reason given, presumably with the hope that they'd steer their many followers to the hotel.
Then there are the online retailers which reportedly "offer discounts proportional to a customer's Klout score. And perhaps most insidiously, Wired notes a Salesforce.com service introduced a couple of months ago "that lets companies monitor the Klout scores of customers who tweet compliments and complaints; those with the highest scores will presumably get swifter, friendlier attention from customer service reps."
Those sorts of reports are certainly motivation to seek a better Klout profile, even if it requires mindlessly tweeting "food porn" up to 45 times a day, as one Los Angeles-based Klout addict reports doing. Having a solid Klout score can secure one various freebies and upgrades, not to mention expedited customer service and even a better shot at a job.
That's nice, but who's really benefiting here? As numerous skeptics in the comment thread for the Wired article complain, it's tough to see how this development is truly good for anybody besides Klout and the social platforms it tracks.
For more from Damon, follow him on Twitter @dpoeter.
