If you’re job hunting and your potential employer asks you what your Klout score is because they’re looking to hire someone who has a Klout score above 35, would you be happy or offended?

That depends on your social influence.  See, Klout measures a person’s social influence across their social media sites.  The more people you are connected to and the more engaged you are, the higher your score.  So if you’re active on Facebook, Twitter and Google+, and you have a huge audience that’s fully engaged, then you’ll probably be happy revealing your Klout score.  But what if you’re just not into all that social networking stuff?  Should that be a hindrance to landing your dream job?

Klout CEO Jeff Fernandez tweeted last week that he was glad to see Salesforce was looking to hire someone with a Klout score of above 35.  According to reports, the position they were looking to fill was for a “Community Manager,” a position for which  a Klout score of 35 should not relevant.

“Why should they mean something to a company like Salesforce? I have no idea,” Drew Olanoff of TechCrunch stated. “The job that Salesforce was hiring for was ‘Community Manager.’ Some have argued that looking at someone’s Klout score is perfectly reasonable since that person should have a firm grasp on how Internet services and social networking works. However, in my experience, the smartest marketing, customer service, and community folks don’t really use these services to build a ‘personal brand.’ They just do good work.”

After the article was published, Fernandez tweeted to Olanoff about how Klout is being utilized by companies in their hiring process and to make a long story short, Olanoff asked Fernandez to come down for an interview to discuss the matter.

During the interview, Fernandez discussed how employers are finding it hard to find great employees because they browse through hundreds or even thousands of applications and none seem to stand out.  Having a high Klout score could be interpreted as a skill because, admit it, it’s not easy to connect and influence others.

So if you have it flaunt it… in people skills, that is.

As for Salesforce hiring someone with a Klout score of 35 or higher, Fernandez explains that it’s not a sole requirement but it would be great if the applicant has that score.  And that 35 is actually a below average score, 38 being the norm.  But Fernandez also noted that even Klout doesn’t really base their hiring process on a person’s Klout score, so that’s kind of contradicting to what they want to achieve.  Which makes Olanoff doubt the importance of Klout even more.

But others believe since Klout is all about the metrics, hiring people based on how high their score is will eventually catch on even, if Klout’s metric is still questionable since their user’s scores often take wild swings.