  It does not matter whether it is a job interview with Tech Giants, Wall
Street firms, or a small startup; all candidates want to demonstrate their best
selves or even present themselves better than they really are. Meanwhile,
recruiters want to know the candidates' authentic selves and detect soft skills
that prove an expert candidate would be a great fit in any company. Recruiters
worldwide usually struggle to find employees with the highest level of these
skills. Digital footprints can assist recruiters in this process by providing
candidates' unique set of online activities, while social media delivers one of
the largest digital footprints to track people. In this study, for the first
time, we show that a wide range of behavioral competencies consisting of 16
in-demand soft skills can be automatically predicted from Instagram profiles
based on the following lists and other quantitative features using machine
learning algorithms. We also provide predictions on Big Five personality
traits. Models were built based on a sample of 400 Iranian volunteer users who
answered an online questionnaire and provided their Instagram usernames which
allowed us to crawl the public profiles. We applied several machine learning
algorithms to the uniformed data. Deep learning models mostly outperformed by
demonstrating 70% and 69% average Accuracy in two-level and three-level
classifications respectively. Creating a large pool of people with the highest
level of soft skills, and making more accurate evaluations of job candidates is
possible with the application of AI on social media user-generated data.
