For fear of not being hired at a job interview, many candidates tend to lie about their qualities and skills, and even exaggerate some of their knowledge, such as claiming an intermediate level of English or advanced-user status in certain computer programs that the job requires.
Let’s suppose one of the essential requirements for getting the job is a perfect command of Excel. The truth is that we can lie (say we’ve mastered it) and learn it in a couple of weeks. Likewise, many people tend to lie about skills we all apparently have, such as people skills, punctuality, resilience in the face of failure and being used to working under pressure. If we were completely honest at a job interview, most people wouldn’t be hired (Read: CVs are crap).
Clearly, a worker who lies, as long as the interviewer doesn’t catch them out, will have a better chance of getting the job than an honest worker who admits they lack some of the knowledge required.
So… what is a company really looking for? An honest candidate, or someone capable of lying to land the job?
According to a study by Evolv, a data provider that analyses how workers perform once they’ve been hired, workers who padded their knowledge and skills performed much better in the job than those who were completely honest to get it.
The explanation is very simple: especially in sales and customer service departments, those who got the job by “lying a little” were better at telling customers what they wanted to hear, and so they closed more sales than the workers who were completely honest at the interview. They were also much more effective at dealing with unhappy customers, because they knew how to empathise with them, even if it meant telling so-called white lies.
This would confirm a number of other things we’ve discussed several times before: a company doesn’t always know what it’s looking for or what a department needs, and sometimes it asks candidates for too many requirements for a job that in principle would call for other kinds of skills, ones that are very hard to spot in a CV or a job interview, especially if the interview isn’t specific and practical, focused on the candidate’s real worth.
Read: Solid lines in human resources: when talent acquisition turns into a talent drain.
Further reading
Featured image: Michiel Jelijs from Groningen, The Netherlands, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
