Candidate ‘dubbed’ in a job interview shows Covid’s impact on the selection process

It’s as if a “Seinfeld” plot meets John Le Carré.

Kristin Zawatski, 44, who works in information technology in a department that has about 70 employees, was helping to conduct a virtual job interview. She said she was impressed by the candidate’s firm understanding of the technical requirements of the post. But, about 15 minutes into the conversation, one of her colleagues paused the audio of the interview.

“The person who is answering the questions is not the person who is in front of the camera,” he declared, according to her recollection of the incident, which caused gasps of astonishment from the participants.

Zawatski’s colleague had recognized the voice coming from the screen and realized that whoever was answering the technical questions was someone he knew, while the job candidate moved his lips on the screen – something the candidate’s friend had just admitted in a message. of text.

“What did he think was going to happen when he moved across the country and realized he didn’t have the competence to do the job?” Zawatski pondered later.

Job interviews have always demanded a couple of somewhat incongruous qualities: authenticity but at the same time giving the impression of being well prepared. Job interview guides recommend that candidates bring out the best in them. Recruiters encourage people to be genuine, and even have fun with the process. (“The surprising secret to success in a job interview is: be yourself,” says one typical piece of advice.)

And this combination of recommendations can be psychologically tricky, and lead job seekers to wonder how they can at the same time convey an idea of ​​their flawed personalities — they’re ordinary people, leaving dirty dishes piled up in the sink — and at the same time time to brag about their genius math skills, mastery of multiple languages, leadership talents, mastery of using software, or whatever.

“It’s easy to present yourself as you would like to be, as opposed to what you really are,” said Robert Feldman, a psychologist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and author of “The Liar in Your Life.” He added that people tend to learn from an early age the advantages that a little lying confers.

Children are taught that when their grandmother presents them with an incredibly ugly coat, they should act like they’ve just won a PlayStation, Feldman said. And as we get older, the rewards of lying grow — especially in job interviews, when there’s money on the table.

Remote hiring processes have given some job seekers the impression that they can use extreme forms of dishonesty and get away with it. Virtual interviews leave open the possibility that a candidate will get answers from a friend.

Phone interviews can create a psychological distance between interviewer and interviewee, Feldman pointed out, which perhaps makes it easier for people to rationalize the idea of ​​misrepresenting themselves. At the same time, people now undergo far more interviews than in the past, as about 20% of employed workers in the United States changed jobs voluntarily in 2020.

Still, recruiters know to expect some hype in the hiring process. It’s something even pop culture recognizes. “Fluent in Finnish?” a friend reading her resume asks Isla Fisher’s character in “Becky Bloom’s Consumer Delusions.” The character replies: “Everyone embellishes the curriculum a little.”

Psychologists who study interviews point out that there can be a wide range of inauthentic behavior at play. Most job seekers use a technique known as “impression management” in the interview process, which means they’re thinking about how to present the best version of themselves, according to Joshua Bourdage, an organizational psychologist at University of Calgary, and Nicolas Roulin, an organizational psychologist at Saint Mary’s University.

But there are honest, relatively honest, and completely misleading versions of it. Deceptively seeking acceptance may involve laughing at unfunny jokes, while doing so honestly may involve connecting with the interviewer about truly shared interests, such as “hiking” or watching the New York Knicks games.

Moderate imaging means inflating one’s abilities just a little bit (perhaps turning a camping trip into a true passion for being with nature), while extensive imaging means creating stories about false accomplishments (include that story about camping a fistfight with a bear). About two-thirds of job seekers deceptively seek acceptance, and more than half admit to resorting to moderate image-making, according to research by Bourdage and Roulin.

The likelihood that people will resort to these practices depends on how much they want a job, and also on how much they trust that they can lie without getting caught. Research has shown that Americans are more likely to resort to deceptive tactics in job interviews than Western Europeans, and these practices are more common in certain areas of the northeast of the country and in California than in other regions of the United States.

Determining whether or not employers perceive these objectionable behaviors may depend on how desperate they are to fill jobs. At the moment, with job vacancies soaring and unemployment down, many companies are struggling to find talent.

“There’s a lot of demand out there, and not a lot of people able to satisfy it,” said Ben Zhao, a professor of computer science at the University of Chicago who researches online marketplaces, adding that the imbalance in the labor market could put pressure on companies to riskier hires. “This makes them more susceptible to misrepresentation or fraud.”

Employers are also facing a time when collective angst results in all sorts of unusual misbehavior. That’s something Tamara Sylvestre, 32, said she noticed last year when she was working in recruiting for a Michigan-based human resources firm and interviewed a person for a position in an engineering department. She did an initial phone interview, in which she noticed that the candidate’s voice was quite high-pitched. When she conducted a subsequent technical video interview, her voice sounded deeper.

Sylvestre later asked why the tone of his voice seemed to have changed, and the candidate admitted that he had asked a colleague to do the video interview instead.

“And what did you intend to do if you got the job?” Sylvestre remembers asking the candidate in amazement. “And he replied that he was very nervous, and that he thought no one would notice. And since the work was 100% remote, maybe it didn’t make a difference.”

Mark Bradbourne, 46, who works as an engineer in Ohio, remembers a crook who took the hiring process even further a few years ago. Bradbourne asked a new employee, in his first week at the company, to perform a data visualization exercise similar to what he had done in his technical interview. The new hire didn’t know how to proceed. When Bradbourne reminded him that he’d already done the same task during the hiring process, the man got up and ran out of the room, quitting on the spot.

Persuading a friend to participate in the technical part of a selection process is an extreme variation on the old interview bluff trick. But organizational psychologists note that interviewers tend to reward honesty. They recognize when people seem to genuinely fit in with aspects of a company that echo their interests, Bourdage said.

Interviewers are also getting smarter at detecting dishonesty. Meta, formerly Facebook, has psychologists on its team who develop qualifying questions whose answers a candidate would struggle to bluff. Scott Gregory, chief executive of Hogan Assessment Systems, a personality testing company, encourages employers to move away from classic interview questions—”what are your strengths?”—and instead ask situational and behavioral questions in which candidates narrate experiences or explore what-if scenarios.

Meta’s chief recruiter said the company expects job seekers to turn on their cameras during video interviews, although it accepts requests to the contrary in circumstances that make it difficult to fulfill the request.

Still, the more subtle stresses of an interview teacher remain. In a corporate culture where one of the popular terms of the moment is transparency, how much of their real personality should a person reveal before being hired? Should a person be themselves when being themselves could prevent them from getting the job?

“The line between being unprofessional, too casual, or too laid-back from the candidate’s authentic self is very thin,” said Miranda Kalinowski, Meta’s vice president of worldwide recruitment.

Translation by Paulo Migliacci