Interview

When I first broached the subject of judging candidates by their honesty during job interview, I insisted that it's downright important. The thought of hiring a liar feels too unsettling. But I changed my mind when I was shown the results of a psychology experiment at the University of Massachusetts. The candidate I met recently is certainly not alone in being economical in truth.

During that eye-opening study, psychologists led a group of job applicants to believe that they were interviewing for the position of tutoring high school students. At the end of the experiment, the researchers sheepishly confessed that there was actually no such job position, and then asked the participants to watch a recording of their interviews. "We're sorry to have misled you," the researchers continued with debriefing. "Could you please identify every instance in which you deliberately misled the interviewer too?"

Turns out that four out of every five job hunters bent the truth, or that they each did so, on average, more than twice.

If those results weren't bad enough, add to it the fact that interviewers were seldom good at identifying liars. In many cases, seasoned interviewers are no better than novices.

The lesson? We should emphasize less with job interview. Unless, of course, we're recruiting the top-notch liar.