Exploring the business value of soft skills in social networks - a conceptual evaluation approach based on consensus scoring

Since the emergence of the Internet era in the early 1990s, many evaluation systems for the rating of various entities emerged. For example, at amazon.com people are able to rate books and transactions or to leave comments for other users. Although there is a wide variety of rating and evaluation mechanisms on the Internet, there are only few mechanisms for the evaluation of user skills in social networks. For many users online profiles displaying other people’s skills are increasingly important, e. g., when contracting freelancers or finding candidates for a job opening. However, current profiles found in social networks offer either unstructured free text that is hard to handle efficiently or simplistic rating schemes that do not convey meaningful information. In addition, it is unclear how trustworthy the information on the profile is. Hence, in this paper, we provide a novel approach for the evaluation of soft skills on the Internet. Our approach is based on a consensus measurement approach in social network services based on social graphs as a formalization of personal relationships among users.