Lovers Lie and So Do Candidates. Digital Interviews Don’t.

A few years ago when I was recruiting for HireVue, Daniel Banfield was one of my prospective candidates. During an interview, we were talking about candidates and the crazy stories we both had from when we recruited back in the day! Many of the stories that stood out to both of us supported the statistic that candidates lie about the information listed on their resume or during the interview process 80% of the time! I know that I’ve been guilty of stretching my resume a little, and I am sure there are candidates who have lied on resumes, and in interviews. But 80%??!! Here were some of the experiences we have had to validate the stats:

From the Recruiting Life of Chad

• Lying on a resume – about the smallest things
• Candidates stating they graduated from certain universities and never attended.
• Candidates changing their names from last name to first name and vice versa to be resubmitted for a role
• Candidates cheating with online tests by having someone else take the exam
• Sending in someone else to go in person to an interview – someone completely different than the person that showed up when we made the offer
• Typing, and looking up information during a phone interview when they didn’t know the answer to a question

From the Recruiting Life of Daniel

• I was often asked by friends or friends of friends to help me with their resume. I know for sure I made several candidates look a lot more impressive on paper than they could likely perform on the job. Granted, several were very good candidates, but they certainly got a boost.
• One of the best candidates I interviewed had a resume that was absolutely awful. I remember putting a call into the Sourcing Professional who submitted the candidate to ask what he was thinking. The interview went well and she really shined and gave some great examples of customer service that weren’t at all reflected on her resume. She also proved to be an excellent employee.
• I remember the candidates I knew from previous experience that would come up with a flashy title at their previous place of employment or even state he/she was a manager or director at the company when in fact they held non-management roles. I found one in particular pretty amusing since he claimed to have had the title that I currently held at the company. I could only think to myself that I had been replaced or he was really exaggerating his resume.

Now, we know that digital interviewing is a little new and scary to take if you are a candidate, and it’s your first time, but when I first started reviewing completed digital profiles for open positions at HireVue, an interesting thing happened – instead of debunking candidates abilities during a phone interview, I was able to review a video profile multiple times over and tell instantly who was lying, and who was telling the truth.

A study was conducted by a psychology group to determine whether people could tell if someone was lying over the phone, or in person. Only 17% of the test members could tell if the person was lying over the phone. When test members were shown a video of the same people discussing the same topics they determined over 80% of the time which persons were lying. Face it, digital videos are in our future, and they don’t lie like our lovers or our prospective candidates.