Faking in an Employment Interview

Faking in an employment interview—which occurs whenever a job applicant consciously presents himself or herself in distorted ways in order to create a favorable impression—may well compromise the predictive validity of the process. For that reason, researchers have recently sought to develop a questionnaire that measures faking. In a series of studies, Julia Levashina and Michael Campion (2007) asked hundreds of college seniors who were active on the job market to anonymously rate the degree to which they engaged in various faking behaviors during their most recent interviews. Some of the behaviors involved outright lying (“I claimed that I have skills I do not have”); others involved forms of exaggeration (“I exaggerated my responsibilities on previous jobs”), ingratiation (“I laughed at the interviewer’s jokes even when they were not funny”), and image protection (“When asked directly, I did not mention some problems that I had in past jobs”).

Just as some individuals are more prone to fake than others, certain employment situations in general tend to increase these tendencies. In one role-playing study, for example, researchers asked college students to imagine themselves on the job market and found that the more competitors they were told there were and the lower the ratio who will get hired, the more students indicated an intention to fake. In a second study, students indicated a greater intention to fake when the job was presented as particularly attractive.