Top Lies Told By Candidates

Whenever people talk about candidate lying, the usual topics come up: Exaggerating dates of employment, falsifying education, inflating salary or title, hiding a criminal record, and hiding a drug habit. Most of these can be easily caught by a decent background check. You can ask for a W-2 to verify compensation. Simple diligence can prevent a person who is lying about these issues from being hired.

Much more important are the really important lies told by candidates that are harder to detect, and that can cause you real harm, because you will hire the candidate despite the lies. Candidates will misrepresent their capabilities more often as the five items above. Some of the misrepresentation isn’t even their fault! Employers ask leading questions, like, “You’ve set up a sales department before, right?” When the candidate readily agrees, without being asked for evidence, a check mark goes in the “plus” column. Behavioral based interviewing, where candidates are asked to illustrate a trait (like leadership, teamwork), with specific examples from their work history, can also cloud the issue. Most people can dredge up a good story to illustrate a trait, but did they actually accomplish anything with this trait?

If a candidate does not have strong capability to do the critical tasks of the job, the result can be very costly: lost opportunities, critical mistakes, lost morale, cost of replacing the hire, etc.

Employers have to ask the right questions to help the candidate tell the truth. When employers take the time to develop SMART performance objectives (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound), they can turn those objectives into interview questions that make it far more likely a candidate will have to tell the truth. An example: Let’s say that a Sales Executive has to grow sales by setting up multi-state distribution and establishing a key strategic alliance. The employer can ask: One of our most important goals is to establish multi-state distribution as a key method of growing sales. What is there specifically in your background that would enable you to achieve this? You keep drilling until the details emerge: Who were the distributors? Did the program succeed? How much in sales? All of these details could be verified, so the candidate must tell the truth. A great way to evaluate candidates, but also a great recruitment tool: Mediocre candidates hate these questions, and excellent candidates love these, because they have the answers, and are delighted to talk about how they will respond to the employers real, well-defined challenges.

You can easily check on the basic lies, but make sure you have a process to protect yourself from the biggest, most expensive lies – and get an accurate, truthful answer to the most important question: can the candidate really do the job?

Comment by Sandra McCartt on April 12, 2010 at 5:41pm: The only flaw in this approach is if you are interviewing a candidate who works for a competitor. Drilling down on specific distributors, sales volume of specific clients etc is getting into the area of proprietary information. Just had one like this where the candidate felt he was being "pimped" for proprietary information that could hurt his current employer.

How would you handle a situation like that?

Comment by Mark Bregman on April 12, 2010 at 6:01pm: Have them talk about the PROCESS they went through, not the content. How did you do this, that? What kind of help did you have? What did you have to do yourself? What was the biggest challenge in acheiving the goal? What were you most proud of getting done? Within the answers, there will be further opportunities to probe, without getting them to reveal specifics about clients, etc.

Comment by Sandra McCartt on April 12, 2010 at 6:11pm: Agreed, this client was being specific about names and numbers and was taking copious notes so needless to say the interview did not go well when the candidate refused to identify specific clients and amounts of sales to each of them. I may have misread your blog but i thought you indicated asking who the distributors were.

Comment by Sandra McCartt on April 12, 2010 at 6:12pm: Or how those details could be verified without contacting the candidates clients?

Comment by Mark Bregman on April 12, 2010 at 6:15pm: You raise a good point about interviewing people from direct competitors, and in such cases, care and discretion would apply. I would advocate asking something like this: "What can you tell me that would give me confidence you could set up distribution for us?" Verification can often be done with references that have left the current employer, and can comment on the candidate's performance without much risk.

Comment by Thyaga on April 13, 2010 at 10:11am: This is one the situation where even a most talented internal recruiter will not be able to deliver. You will have to engage a highly qualified head-hunter (external) to help. At WizioTec we constantly help our clients to hire top talent from their competitors and hiring managers loves these kind of referrals.

Comment by Steve Fleischner on April 14, 2010 at 11:42am: A big talent a successful recruiter brings to the table is the ability to evaluate what and how a person answers even if the recruiter does not have the technical ability in that area to evaluate the content within the answer. So for example, I do not know Six Sigma Process Improvement methodology but I've certainly interviewed several hundred Six Sigma Black Belts over the years and I am confident I can tell with a high degree of certainty if a person has the experience I am looking for based on how his/her answers are constructed. Kinda like not only what is said, but how it is said can also be taken into account.

Comment by Les Rosen on April 15, 2010 at 2:59am: Are we missing the fact that there is a difference between an interviewer and a recruiter? If a firm is looking for someone to head sales, presumably a recruiter will have knowledge of the industry, competitors and players and will be seeking someone that has a proven track record. On the other hand, if a firm is merely interviewing applicants that were found online or who responded to an opening, then yes, a candidate may be able to exaggerate their ability to do the job and fool the interviewer. If recruiting targeted people who have succeeded before, there is of course a much higher chance of success. If interviewing strangers off the street, then a standard background check in fact does go a long ways. For example a standard background check will confirm (or deny) if an applicant ever managed people or was in charge of a department, etc. At the end of the day, a good liar will outwit even the best interviewer, because human beings are simply not as good as we think we are at spotting lies. It’s a good idea to follow-up your instincts with a factual verification.

Comment by Steve Fleischner on April 15, 2010 at 9:15am: Typically in a search a recruiter will encounter both candidates who are known to them and previously unknown to them. A total stranger who was not directly recruited can be the best candidate. Each candidate should be treated identically in trying to ascertain from them directly, information regarding their experience. Prior experience interviewing candidates can help you sort through the facts and the fiction even if you are not technically qualified to judge that experience. I don't know how to program in Java but I can select the best qualified Java candidates because I have previously interview thousands of Java candidates. How those candidates describe their Java coding experience will lead to me making a pretty good educated guess as to who is qualified. And frankly even if I recruit a local and well known prince of Java, I am not letting my guard down and assuming that based on hi/her reputation that he/she will be by default more honest in his/her answers than some stranger who may have answered my ad.

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