Deception makes interviews unreliable

October 17, 2024

The immigrants “are eating the dogs".

Wow, can we fact check that please!

In the biggest job interview of his life – the presidential debate of 2024 with Kamala Harris - Donald pulls out a big bold lie.

But unlike having Donald as your interviewee, when other interviewees deceive us in job interviews – and they do (see Hogue et al 2013), it’s usually far more subtle and research suggests deception in interviews is hard to detect (Posthuma et al. 2002). And we can’t do the fact checking like the presidential debate moderators.

In addition, consider that we usually only ask candidates one question per competency and the example they use may not be representative of what they typically do.

As a result, the data we get from interviews could be highly unreliable.

So, what’s the solution?

The way to overcome this lack of reliability is to have multiple methods of assessing the same competencies during a recruitment process, including ones that are less open to bias such as personality assessment.

The reason why personality assessment is a more reliable source of data than interviews is that the candidate is asked multiple questions about any one competency. The ‘right’ answer is also unknown so candidates are more likely to give an answer that closely resembles how they consistently behave. This gives us a more accurate and reliable understanding of their competence.

Now before you ask the question, the answer is NO. We are not advocating that personality profiling replace interviews. Instead, personality profiling should be added to the process that already includes interviews and reference checks. Combining personality data with your interview and reference check data gives you the chance to cross reference the data to verify conclusions and increases the number, accuracy and reliability of data points across each competency. This gives you more robust and reliable findings, which equals better hiring outcomes.