Are There Any Job Applicants Like George Washington?
In today’s business climate, when the U.S. unemployment rate is at a 16-year high, many employers are flooded with job applicants. When looking to hire and find that ‘perfect match,’ employers obviously want to avoid learning too late that an employee has completely misrepresented his or her skills, qualifications, experiences or background.
As mentioned in my last Insight, employers can find that some applicants may engage in self-serving misrepresentation because of the competitive nature of job-seeking situations. The applicant’s goal is to get the job; whereas the employer’s goal is different—to find the most qualified person for the job.
During this process an employer should be aware of the potential for what the scientific testing community refers to as response distortion or misrepresentation. Here is how employers can set out to diminish the effects of assessment misrepresentation and how testing can validly be utilized in the workplace.
Assessment questionnaires must be well constructed in order to be effective.
First, there are plenty of pre-employment questionnaires around that assess the basic personality facets of prospective employees. Many of them assess personality characteristics based on the “Big Five” personality traits and some specifically link these scores to success in different types of jobs.
Then there are assessments called honesty or integrity tests. These tests assess such areas as honesty, substance abuse, and anger control. For both kinds of tests, the better, properly-constructed ones have built-in questions or scales that assess whether the test-taker is deliberately trying to make a good impression—i.e., is lying. We are not talking about people who are simply putting their best foot forward, as just about everyone does in this type of situation. We are talking about people who are out-and-out lying, misrepresenting themselves or their abilities and/or personality in order to get the job.
So, how can an employer know if a test is properly constructed?
The testing company should be glad to provide technical literature on the construction of the test, and this should be evaluated by a psychologist. Basically, what a test constructor needs to have determined, in order to build a scale that detects deception, is how people who do tell the truth differ from those who do not. These kinds of test items are often identified by the test constructor by asking a group of people to deliberately lie, and determining which of their responses differ significantly from those of people who are told not to lie. Some of these key questions will be related to jobs and the workplace in general; some are related to the act of lying, and some identify lying in general.
What is happening if someone is ‘over-endorsing’ or saying too much?
One commonly used criterion for picking key items is the over-endorsement principle. This principle refers to the finding that people who make stuff up, unless they’re very good at it, don’t know how much to make up. In other words, they don’t know how much lying to do. So they end up doing too much.
For example, consider the item “Once in a while I feel a bit angry at somebody.” If people say “no” to that item, they’re likely telling a lie. Virtually everybody feels a bit angry sometimes, and a person who denies it and expects to get away with the denial simply doesn’t know the norms.
As another example, in a court-related situation we sometimes see people pretending to have a mental illness. Instead of describing what may turn out to be just one type of mental illness, these people end up claiming to have the symptoms of all kinds of mental illnesses. People who are pretending tend to endorse too much.
Employers today can find themselves completely overwhelmed by all the resumes and applications stacking up. Not only that, one bad hiring decision can be extremely costly to a small-business employer.
For more information on response distortion and on testing in general, a good source is the book titled Personality Assessment by Lanyon and Goodstein (3rd edition, Wiley, 1997).