Candidates Lie To Me Because I Ask Them To.

Recruiters spend their days asking people questions about what they do. The hardest part isn't catching people lying - it's relatively easy to keep asking people detailed questions until there's no room for them to wiggle - it's determining when they're lying to you in a way that is useful.

Many people think interviews are wasteful. We do too many. They don't do a good job of filtering good candidates from bad. They are filled with conscious and unconscious bias. All of that is true. It doesn't convince me that interviews don't work.

What if interviews actually do a wonderful job of filtering out candidates who don't know how to lie correctly? There aren't any studies to prove this, but the longer I recruit, the more I'm convinced that the starting premise of most interviews is based on deception, which means the primary filter in an interview is how well the hiring manager and the candidate communicate within that false premise. That's probably too meta to be useful, so let me take another shot at it.

You are not a great worker. Your company is not an amazing place to work. If we were 100% truthful, no one in their right mind would ever take a job or hire someone. There is always something unfair. There is always something you hold back. There is no perfect company or candidate. And that's okay. We're not looking for perfection. We're looking to make better choices, which means a comparison between one candidate and another. It's a decision between your current job and your next one.

I'm sometimes accused of being a pessimist, but look on the bright side of my statement. Your choice just got a lot easier if you're not matched against the standard of perfect.

An interview should not be based on finding the best candidate or the best job. It should be based on determining if two people can work together and improve their situations. You want to create a mental image of harmony. If that's the case, then why do we ask these questions?

• Tell me about a time when you encountered a difficulty at work and how you overcame it.
• Your resume shows you have two years of experience in this field, but you had a decade in another field, and then a year of unemployment. What led you to this transition, and why are you looking now?
• If you didn't get this job, what other jobs would you be interested in pursuing?

These are all legitimate questions. They can yield useful information, and they give the candidate the chance to make a pitch. They are also aimed at getting the candidate to play the interview game, which is to show they've thought about the job, the answer, and can glibly recite an answer within a predictable spectrum.

The first question wants to test your self-awareness and your ability to face adversity. To pass, you pick a topic of sufficient depth, give enough detail to prove it happened, and then conclude with positive, action-oriented details. That doesn't sound too bad, does it? If that's the case, then why do interviewers ask the follow-up?

"And how did it end."

If you don't have a clear-cut, easy to understand victory, you're often sunk. In the interview debrief, someone will bring up that you failed to answer the question correctly because you didn't pick a difficulty you overcame. This is technically true. It's not helpful, but it is true. The candidate is trying to pick something that matters, but in doing so, they often point to a structural problem they encountered. Overcoming is not the same as surviving and learning from it. And thus, many interviews die because the jobseeker talked about what was important to them instead of what was an acceptable story with the right finish.

The second question (why you made a career transition) is a test. Did you plan out your career, or are you bouncing around? We can't ask it that way, but you're telling the candidate that if they encountered a career jolt, it's likely you plan to penalize them for their failure, and not their success at switching to a new career. Again, it's a valid question, but it also encourages the candidate to fudge a little about their circumstances out of fear that you will penalize them for growing and learning. It's the same for question 3, which is designed to find out if they candidate wants your job, or any job. [The right answer is your job]

There are hundreds of questions we can tackle that have hidden meanings. When you point this out to smart managers, they look at you and agree - "that's the point." They want someone who plays the game. I've heard that many times. But playing the game isn't the same thing as telling the truth. And then we make the leap that someone who can "play the game" has "done the work."

So what do we do? First - we have to decide if we're okay with the interview being more of an audition. Maybe that's not the worst thing, and it does filter out people who can't work with us. If that's the case, we need to improve the way we evaluate. No more deep-sixing candidates because we were able to trick them.

If we are not satisfied with our results, the way forward is simple. We reframe the interview, telling candidates what we're looking for up front. We share questions ahead of time, allowing them to think through their answers before delivering them.

Did you read that right? Do I really want candidates to have a list of questions beforehand?

I do. I want to give candidates the chance to prepare, to think through their answers, and to come to the interview ready to share what they learned. I want my questions to lead to quality discussions where the candidate and the hiring manager aren't curious if the other person is interested.

It doesn't sound that controversial, does it? Doesn't everyone want an interview where you get honest answers to honest questions? And yet...we don't. Ironically, out of fear of being lied to, we as hiring authorities make the mistake of creating an interview premise that exposes liars by asking the candidates to lie to us. Lie to me, so that I don't get tricked by you lying to me.

It's not that simple. And lie is probably not the right word. How about we go with "deceptive impression management." That sounds better. Or is that a lie?