(From Fast Company) -- If you are planning to interview applicants next year at your company, here’s an important question: Would you rather hire someone with a high IQ or a high Klout score?

Increasingly, employers are counting the two as equally valuable. As we move from a knowledge economy to a social economy, companies have begun to weigh applicants’ “personal branding” skills just as heavily as they weigh core job capabilities and traditional qualifications.

In a recent post on this blog, I noted how having a good Klout score can boost the appeal of applicants in the hiring process, and that in fact high scores had already helped many socially skilled job-seekers land positions.

Well, employers’ consideration of this number has only become more explicit: now, rather than simply making an internal decision to consider applicants’ Klout scores, some companies are actually using the measurement as a first-round qualifier. Salesforce.com, for instance, recently advertised a position that listed ‘a Klout score of 35 or over’ as one of the key ‘desired skills’ for a community manager position.

But, as a recent Fast Company article asked, what is the right balance to strike between considering intelligence and social connectivity in evaluating prospective employees?

Klout considers its two-digit influence evaluations to be “something like an SAT score,” for professionals, a spokesperson told me recently. Just as the  SAT score is one of many factors considered in the college admission process, a Klout score can also indicate one’s competence in the many abstract skills that fall into the realm of “social,” and are crucial to so many jobs today and was noted in the book, The 2020 Workplace as a prediction for future success in the job market.

So, as social capital becomes a valuable credential in more professional fields, indicators like Klout scores have emerged as a convenient way for employers to screen applicants for their ability to build a personal brand and become an “Influencer” in their area of expertise.

Using personal branding in this way can be especially valuable for the large companies that recruit a new fleet of entry-level employees each year. Many accounting and consulting firms, for example, find themselves stumped when choosing from applicant pools full of highly impressive candidates who are hard to distinguish from one from another based on traditional metrics.

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