What Your Klout Score Really Means
Last spring Sam Fiorella was recruited for a VP position at a large Toronto marketing agency. With 15 years of experience consulting for major brands like AOL, Ford, and Kraft, Fiorella felt confident in his qualifications.
Context & Ripple Effects
Klout spent early 2011 pushing its score into everyday view — a Chrome extension that surfaces Klout scores right inside the Twitter timeline made influence a number anyone could read next to any tweet. By spring 2012 the metric has crossed over from novelty to hiring filter: Sam Fiorella, recruited last year for a VP role at a large Toronto marketing agency, brought 15 years of consulting for brands like AOL, Ford, and Kraft — and still found his qualifications weighed against a single algorithmic score.
First-order effects
- Job candidates in marketing now face a new screening variable: a Klout score sits alongside resumes and references in hiring conversations like the Toronto agency's VP search.
- Klout itself gains stakes beyond consumer vanity — its methodology is now consequential enough that Wired's scrutiny was syndicated across eight outlets including Forbes, TechCrunch, and PC Magazine.
Second-order effects
- Agencies and brands that accept the score as a hiring signal push marketing professionals toward optimizing their social output for the metric rather than for clients.
- Rival influence-scoring services get an opening: every documented case of a score mattering in a real hire invites competitors to argue their measurement is fairer.
Third-order effects
- If algorithmic reputation keeps spreading into employment decisions, score providers face accountability pressure traditionally reserved for credit bureaus — opaque methodologies governing real economic outcomes invite demands for transparency and correction rights.
The trend: Social-media influence scores are evolving from profile badges into credentials used in hiring, dragging reputation-algorithm providers toward the accountability standards of formal credit systems.