11 February 2026

Restraint is key: political statements on social media have a significant impact on job prospects

Jobseekers should be careful making political statements online. Saarland University researchers found that HR managers are influenced by whether and how someone expresses their political views – especially if they lean towards extreme political fringes. If the political opinion of the recruiter is contrary to that of the applicant, their job prospects decrease. These findings were described in a Saarland University study that was recently published in the Journal of Business and Psychology.

The following text has been machine translated from the German with no human editing.

In the age of digital application processes, HR managers are increasingly turning to platforms such as LinkedIn to get an idea of the applicants. However, many people share not only career-related information on these platforms, but also political content that suggests which political movement they feel they belong to. 'This information is not only perceived casually, but can also have a decisive influence on the judgement of decision-makers in human resources departments,' explains Dr Denise Vesper, research assistant at the Chair of Work and Organisational Psychology at Saarland University.

Together with other researchers, she investigated how those who review applications in human resources departments react to applicants' political statements and whether they would ultimately hire these individuals. To this end, they presented 350 French decision-makers with a fictitious LinkedIn profile whose political orientation varied systematically between extreme, moderate or neutral.

If the applicant and the evaluator were closer in terms of political views, the person in question was more likely to be evaluated more positively. 'Extreme political positions, on the other hand, led to significantly more critical evaluations – even when qualifications were the same,' Denise Vesper continues. 'If a person was portrayed as politically moderate on the fictitious career profile, the HR manager assessed them more ambivalently, but the reaction was less negative than in the case of an extreme position,' the researcher continues. It is also surprising that more than a fifth of the 350 participants stated that they actively included political information in their decision-making.

The study is particularly relevant for centralised political systems such as the French one. The editors of the Journal of Business and Psychology found the findings of the Saarland scientists so remarkable that they highlighted them with an 'Editor's Commendation.' This award is given to only a few articles in specialist journals. In this case, the paper by Denise Vesper and colleagues is one of 16 selected articles. 
 

Original publication:
Vesper, D., Mönke, F.W., Regh, T.S.D. et al. Evaluating Potential Political Bias in Recruitment: Effects of Extreme vs. Moderate Party Affiliaton. J Bus Psychol (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10869-025-10096-7 

Further information:
Dr. Denise Vesper
Tel.: (0681) 3023303
Email: denise.vesper(at)uni-saarland.de  

Portrait von Denise Vesper
© Jörg Pütz/UdSDr Denise Vesper has investigated how political statements made by applicants on career portals such as LinkedIn affect their job prospects.