Deception in Selection

Interviewees and the Psychology of Deceit

Max A. Eggert

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781409445616
• eBook ISBN: 9781317153993
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

The latest research suggests that 33% of people lie deliberately to achieve employment. The costs of mis-hires are significant in terms of management time, selection and reselection costs and potential legal costs. There are 101 opportunities for applicants to economize with the truth, exaggerate or simply lie, both on their CV and at interview. They may be desperate in a competitive job market; they may think that exaggeration is an expected part of the process or they just rely on the fact that many employers still fail to make the most rudimentary of checks of what they are told. Max Eggert's Deception in Selection will help you, the recruiter, to understand how and why candidates deceive. The book examines proven techniques and tactics to balance the interview game, to restore equity in the face of the clever approaches that sophisticated candidates bring to the interview. Although there is no foolproof way of identifying deception, you can, with practice, become amazingly accurate if there is a commitment to master the basics. The object of this book is to learn how to detect more effectively the fabrications that candidates present in selection situations that would have a direct adverse effect on their performance in the job. Reading it will encourage you to look at lying and truth telling in a new light and discover how pervasively lies and self-deception influence selection decisions. This is a must read guide from a best-selling business author for all those who participate in the selection process.

CHAPTER 1
SOME BACKGROUND TO DECEPTION

This book has been structured to give you the bad news first; not to encourage despair concerning selection but to assist in the understanding of the size, significance and the implications of the problem.

We follow the advice of Sun Tzu in his The Art of War¹ where he advises us to ‘know our enemy’ before we can overcome him.

So, in this section we cover:

• the size of the problem globally;

• difficulties that interviewers face;

• basic reasons why candidates lie during the selection process;

• eight basic reasons why interviewers are not good at lie detection;

• popular areas of fabrications by candidates;

• additional difficulties which impact on selection.

A GLOBAL PROBLEM

It is not uncommon for applicants the world over to presume that selectors expect both the CVs and the interview to have maximum impact; both of them putting all the benefits the candidate can bring to a position in as positive a light as possible. No surprise then that fabrication abounds internationally as the following exemplify.²

Russia

[email protected], one of the largest employment agencies in Russia, surveyed 160,880 people between the ages of 18 and 50 from several large Russian cities and 75 per cent admitted to not telling the truth during interviews. Surprisingly, since it is so easy to verify, the most common lie was a fluency in a foreign language. Similar to western Europe, it was thought acceptable for the 40 plus applicant to lie about their age, with the average negative amount being three years.

Australia

Galaxy research found that 17 per cent of their sample of 1,010 Australians admitted to ‘stretching the truth’ during interviews, 10 per cent admitted to inflating their remuneration, 6 per cent dispatched false résumés to employers and 3 per cent lied about their qualifications. Remarkable, to the detriment of employers, was that 16 per cent of respondents nominated friends as employer referees.³

America

Interestingly, head hunter Jude Werra⁴ produces a Liars’ Index⁵ twice a year and has found that over the years more and more applicants, currently as many as one in five, claim qualifications which they do not have. The most recent figure on going to press according to Werra’s index is a running two-year average for false education claims and it is as the increduously high rate of 20.75%.

UK

In 2004 the CIPD reported that one in four companies rescinded a job offer because of CV fraud, with the most common offence being the exaggeration of salary. The fact that 23 per cent of the organisations surveyed dismissed employees after recruitment because of fabrication in their application documentation demonstrates how easily selectors have been duped.

According to Powerchex,⁶ the pre-employment screening consultant, UK job applicants in finance are twice as likely to falsify their CV as other applicants and 22 per cent of British applicants included ‘discrepancies or embellishments’ on the résumés they submitted. Interestingly this comes with local variations, with one in every four applicants from South West England presenting an untruth.

Popular belief suggests that females are more truthful than males. However this was not found to be true in the finance industry where women are more likely to have a discrepancy on their CV. It is not all bad for females for the higher the education, the lower the likelihood of their CV containing a discrepancy. Maybe in the lower echelons the competition with males is higher and what is good for the goose is good for the gander.

Refreshingly, since this is where I would place myself, HR professionals are the most honest in the information they provide to the potential employer but the cynic within me would say that we know what will happen to our job tenure should we embroider our information.

DIFFICULTIES THAT INTERVIEWERS FACE

Before we even look at deceit detection we should note a real and ongoing difficulty with the interview as a management technique. The predominant issue is the lack of feedback. Unlike a marketing campaign or a change in the supply chain process where results good or bad are almost instant, real success is exceptionally difficult to measure effectively.

In alphabetical and not rank order, interviewers are deprived of the luxury of knowing how good, or how much better, a candidate that they have turned down could have been. Additionally, it is only in extreme cases of poor performance that an interviewer will be given some quantified feedback from the commissioning line manager, in which case it will be sometime after the interview has been long forgotten.

It is like throwing candidate darts at the job dartboard with the lights off – there is no feedback on success or otherwise and any manager can tell you that without feedback there can be no improvement in performance.

Given this, and the high number of candidates who do deceive and are offered positions, how can any interviewer, with the best will in the world, improve their lie detection quotient? A number of candidates will continue to slither deceitfully but successfully under the wire.

Perhaps the main difficulty is what psychologists have called ‘truth bias’. Imagine, if you will, a world where there is absolute doubt about everything. Nothing could be believed about a person or what they said until it was proven or substantiated by two or more witnesses or accredited third party. If that were the case the HR department would have to quadruple in size by employing substantial numbers of ‘reference police’. Not only that, line managers would have to wait months before being presented with possible candidates as a result of the validation time required for each and every candidate.

The reality is that as humans we are almost hard wired to accept people for what they are and to believe what they say. We operate with an implicit assumption that what we are being told is genuine unless there is some very good reason to suspect the contrary. This is the truth bias at work. It also explains the high emotions that are felt when an individual discovers they have been duped.

A corollary to this difficulty is that even if you wished to verify a candidate’s claim as to where they worked and what they did, business failure, mergers, acquisitions and downsizing over the past 20 years make exact verification almost impossible for the HR department. And, as we shall see, candidates who have something to hide know this all too well as they create their dago dazzler.

Because of recent lawsuits, most sensible employers will not give a written reference but instead give statements of employment. Anyone with even a passing knowledge of Microsoft Office and the Internet could easily produce such a document (see Appendix 10, page 155).

Interviewing is a two-way process along which there are many threads of questions and answers. It is most unlike a viva, for example, where the candidate is expected to give an exact and correct answer. Consequently the sensible candidate will review the whole of their career to find and provide the most impressive response according to the requirements of the job. In that sense, the sophisticated candidate is rather like the politician who, when meeting the media, says, with a gnomic smile: ‘Now which of you have questions for my answers?’

In life, it is known that ‘when all is said and done’ far more is said than done. ‘Talk is cheap’ aptly illustrates this difficulty for the interviewer. This is just one of the reasons why assessment centres, which extend candidate behaviour, facilitate a far superior candidate selection success.

Then there is also the fact of the relatively short duration of an interview which does not tend to privilege the employer. Even with an extensive two-hour interview, or three one-hour hurdles with different interviewers, how much can be really learnt about a candidate? Behavioural questions, skills and competence challenges can reasonably test a candidate on experience, skills and even motivation, however, reservations concerning cultural fit and values are far more complicated to resolve. Naturally, all candidates will present themselves as high on EQ⁷ as possible; indeed it would be a strange candidate who did not, in the words of the song, ‘smile their best smile’.

Outplacement growth, especially at the executive level, has made the task of the interviewer more complex. Job aspirants are groomed and groomed again with all the feedback benefits of CCTV until they can present themselves in the best possible way. Such candidates disembark with a well-provisioned and shipshape armada of ordnance to impress the interviewer. Those ‘weakness’ questions such as, ‘Tell me about a time when you had a difficult time at work/difficult subordinate’ or, ‘If you undertook that project again what would you do differently?’ or even the more direct chestnut ‘What are your weaknesses?’ have been rehearsed to perfection by leading with an obvious dispositional strength, stretching that strength until it becomes a weakness, putting it in the distant past, showing how it was overcome and then going for the coup de grace, by confirming that it no longer exists or is a problem. For example:

I am and have always been enthusiastic about my work. However, in my very first management position, that is going back some while now, I discovered very quickly that with members of my team who were quiet in their approach, perhaps introverted, my enthusiasm actually inhibited their performance. They need a more calm, less outgoing approach to give of their best. I am still enthusiastic in all that I do but I can easily change my style with a person if that is what they prefer and that is what it takes to get the job done.

Today the interviewer is challenged by far more sophisticated and well-prepared candidates than ever before. A quick perusal of excellent self-help books on how to pass an interview now compete more than ever before with one another on the ever-expanding shelves dedicated to career advancement. Significantly, there are now more books on how to pass an interview than there are on how to select the right candidate.

Along with interview skills curriculum comes fluency training. Speed of speech and fluency provide candidates with two significant advantages: speed has always been, even for an untrained line manager involved in selection, an indicator of both intelligence and veracity. To speak cogently and quickly demands a certain superior cognitive ability, so practiced fluency can go a long way to conceal several signs of deception such as a slowing of speech, long pauses and ums and ah’s.

Finally, senior line and executive managers within the organisation have an additional challenge. Their interview experience is infrequent, the end result being that they do not get enough runs on the board to extend their selection skills. Research suggests⁸ that untrained interviewers make up their minds about a candidate within the first four minutes and then their opinions are made worse by only asking questions that confirm their initial decision.

So there is bad news: when candidates lie most interviewers cannot spot it. But the good news is that with training, the ability to identify and challenge a lie is a skill that we can develop.

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HOW GOOD ARE INTERVIEWERS AT SPOTTING LIES?

Some psychologists have reviewed academic papers on the ability of the general public to identify when someone else is lying. This is called a meta study. Below are the major studies and the average percentage accuracy of all the combined studies.

Researcher and the number of papers reviewed	Average accuracy
Kraut (1980) Kraut all literature available at time	57.0 per cent^a
Vrij (2000) reviewed 39 studies post 1980	56.6 per cent
Bond & DePaulo (2006) reviewed 206 studies 1941–2006	54.0 per cent^b
Bond & DePaulo (2008) reviewed 142 studies to 2007	54.7 per cent^c
Vrij (2008) reviewed 79 studies post 1980	54.3 per cent^d

These meta studies would suggest that untrained people have a just above average ability in spotting a lie.

There have been many other meta studies including DePaulo et al., 1985;^e5 Ekman, 2001;^f Feeley and Young, 1998;^gf Zuckerman, DePaulo and Rosenthal, 1981a;^h Zuckerman and Driver,ⁱ⁹ and they all su...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• About the Author
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Some Background to Deception
• 2 The Mystery of Candidates Who Lie to Themselves
• 3 What Constitutes a Lie?
• 4 Deceptions from Person Perception
• 5 Body Language and Deception
• 6 The Signs of Interview Deceit: Visual, Verbal, Vocal (Body Language, Speech Content, Speech Delivery)
• 7 Discovery of Candidates’ Lies
• 8 Types of Interview
• 9 The Most Dangerous Interviewee: The Psychopath (The Person, the Problem and the Prevention)
• 10 Recommendations
• Appendix 1: Rogues Gallery
• Appendix 2: ‘Good’ Liars: A Summary
• Appendix 3: The 60 Signs
• Appendix 4: Types of Applicant Ego Defence Mechanisms Demonstrated During an Interview
• Appendix 5: Body Language for Interviewer Confidence
• Appendix 6: References and the Finding of the House of Lords
• Appendix 7: Sample Telephone Reference with an Applicant’s Previous Manager
• Appendix 8: Academic Institutions Which are Not Recognised
• Appendix 9: Creating your Fake Degree Certificate
• Appendix 10: Creating Your Fake Reference
• Further Reading
• End Note
• Index