The truth about lies: reminding interviewers that applicants lie may help screen out fabrications and exaggerations

HR Magazine, May, 2004 by Joey George, Kent Marett

People lie on their resumes. They lie on job applications. And they generally get away with it--despite HR's best efforts to derail the dishonest. But, according to research that we conducted, simply reminding an interviewer about the prevalence of lies may make a notable difference in that person's efforts to distinguish fiction from fact.

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Although no one knows the exact proportion of job seekers who enhance their personal work histories, estimates range from 40 percent to 70 percent.

Certainly, hiring employees based on such misinformation presents clear, potential risks for HR professionals and their companies. HR professionals who suspect false information on an applicant's resume should ask appropriate follow-up questions during an interview. Doing so could be the key to uncovering lies and eliminating the applicant from further consideration.

However, the effectiveness of that approach could depend on the medium in which the interview is conducted. With the rise of the personal computer and the Internet, interviews increasingly are being held through videoconferencing, e-mail and even instant messaging, especially in the initial stages.

Says Nina Segal, an international career specialist with monster.ca, the Canadian portion of the global Monster employment web site: "More and more organizations are using technology to make interviewing less expensive while simultaneously casting a wide geographic net to attract a global candidate pool .... An e-mail interview, or one through instant messaging, is sometimes used as an initial step in the hiring process."

But electronic screening mechanisms such as e-mail and instant messaging provide little or no visual or other nonverbal communication, compared with more traditional phone or face-to-face encounters. A person's voice or facial expressions are unavailable to the computer-using interviewer. Thus, lying applicants may be better able to get away with their ruse over electronic media.

A Controlled Experiment

We conducted research to test the notion that electronic media may work to the advantage of lying applicants. A total of 156 undergraduate students majoring in management information systems (MIS) in the business school at Florida State University in Tallahassee participated in the study.

In the study, students reported individually to a suite of interview rooms. The students were kept separated, since we hoped to mimic an environment in which interviewers and applicants cannot see each other.

Each student was paired with another student, but neither knew the other's identity. One student became the interviewer and the other became the interviewee. By design, one student in each of the 78 pairs arrived at the experiment site 15 minutes before the other. The first student to arrive was placed in the role of the applicant; the student who arrived second served as the interviewer.

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Each pair of students was randomly assigned to one of four different computer-based communication media: e-mail (via Hotmail, a web-based e-mail provider); text-based chat (enabled by Microsoft NetMeeting); an audio relay (essentially, a phone conversation via NetMeeting); and a combination of chat and audio (also through NetMeeting).

The "applicants" were first asked to help with a seemingly innocuous task: We presented them with a scenario in which the MIS department was developing a scholarship to be awarded to the top student in the department. To help us set the minimum requirements for potential applicants, we asked the students serving as applicants to fill out a sample application and, in doing so, to make themselves appear as competitive as possible. The students had been asked to bring a current resume with them.

With those simple instructions, applicants proceeded to falsify information on the application. (We knew what was falsified because we compared their applications with their resumes.) They falsified an average of 8.6 items on 19 separate application blanks--even though they had been given no specific instructions on what to change or on how to change it. Although we never said it explicitly, students inferred that falsifying their personal information was acceptable to us if that was what it took to make them appear competitive.

The more commonly altered items included grades (they improved; all became A's regardless of whether they were B's, C's or worse), job experience in MIS-related capacities (students created summer internships with high-prestige companies), and activities in student organizations (everyone became a high-ranking officer). The items that were changed most frequently were also the items that were changed most dramatically, mainly the invention of internships that had never existed.

After the items they changed were pointed out to them, applicants were informed that they would now be interviewed on the basis of the applications, and they were asked to convince the interviewers that the applications were completely legitimate. They were told that the interviewers, who also were MIS students, would be located else-where and that the interviews would be conducted via computer.