When rich, personal and ephemeral backfires: a dynamic inversion in cybervetting

Purpose This study examines why rich, personal and ephemeral social-media content can initially enhance but later undermine employment suitability during cybervetting. Design/methodology/approach Two complementary studies are employed. Study 1 uses a staggered event-study design with NLP-derived content indices to trace shifts in suitability after candidates adopt short-form personal video. Study 2 applies system-GMM to employer–month × job-family panels to test whether risk-centred evaluative attention reinforces itself over sequential hiring cycles. Findings Across studies, rich and personal posts produce an early positive effect on suitability evaluations, but this benefit reverses as evaluators transition from impression formation to risk screening. The inversion is stronger on platforms that enable efficient linguistic extraction and for ephemeral content. Structured social-media assessment policies significantly attenuate this reversal. Originality/value The study challenges the assumption that authenticity and media richness uniformly enhance candidate evaluations. It shows that cybervetting is a time-contingent interpretive process shaped by platform architecture and policy structure.