Employers beware: Applicants often faking their qualifications

Gee left CU for the presidency of Ohio State, then left Ohio State for the presidency of Brown University, impressing the board of trustees at Brown with his expressed commitment to excellence at Brown. Gee’s expression of similar commitment at Ohio State, or for that matter, at Colorado, apparently didn’t give the Brown board cause for reflection.

After Gee assumed the Brown presidency, the Brown trustees learned Gee was in discussions about becoming Vanderbilt University’s president. They reminded Gee of his expressed commitment to Brown, and instructed him to halt discussions with Vanderbilt. Gee agreed, then announced later that he would be leaving Brown for the presidency of Vanderbilt. Shortly afterward Vanderbilt held a Web cast at which Gee expressed his commitment to Vanderbilt. One of the Brown administrators watching the Web cast exploded, “That’s the same speech he gave when he came to Brown!”

Of course it was. In the Gordon Gee “commitment” story we see the same phenomenon we have studied in hiring for many years. Our research makes clear that people to a greater or lesser extent will do or say what it takes to get a job, a strategy that researchers refer to as “faking.”

Faking can range from putting your best foot forward, to lying about an inconvenient part of your work history, to outright fabrication of qualifications. The trick is that not everyone fakes the same amount, so everything else being equal, you will be more likely to hire the person who is faking the most.

In research we have done with our colleagues Mike Zickar and Chuck Hulin, we have found that if you were selectively hiring the top 10 percent of applicants, 70 percent of those people would qualify for hiring because they faked their way to that level rather than because their actual qualifications put them there.

In fact, the more selective you are, the more likely you are to hire someone who is faking. When you are hiring a university president, or any other time you are hiring one person from a large pool, you are being extremely selective. At the same time, you are also maximizing your susceptibility to being faked.

Contradictory? Just take the applicant’s perspective. If you think you are in the top third of an applicant pool and the employer is hiring 50 percent of all applicants, there is nothing to gain from faking and everything to lose if it is detected. If the employer instead is going to hire only one candidate, you have much to gain by faking and less to lose. And if you know you are in the bottom third for this position, you have everything to gain by faking and faking big, and nothing to lose because if you don’t fake, you won’t be hired anyhow.

What can you do to avoid this when you are making a key hire for your own organization? First, you need to be aware that faking is a problem that’s inherent in hiring, one that becomes more important the more desirable a job is and the more selective you are.

Second, you need to watch for a particular kind of faking that allows an applicant to powerfully manage the impressions you form without telling lies: That is to tell you things that fit with your desires and expectations and that you can’t verify as either being true or false. You can verify whether someone majored in computer science but not whether he or she did so in order to create the next Java. You can verify that a potential CEO started five companies but not what led him or her to leave each one.

When an applicant gives you a lot of highly persuasive “information” that you can’t easily verify, the impression you should form is that the applicant is trying hard to form your impression.

So fundamentally, we disagree with the assessment of the Times columnist about the similarity between the two Gordons. Gordon Gecko’s message was “Greed is good.” Gordon Gee’s message is “Gee is good,” which is the message one would expect from any job applicant. It’s up to the prospective employer to look beyond the feel-good impression-shaping message to ask the questions “Good for what?,” “How good?” and “Good for how long?”

The commitment to each university that Gee implied is merely the sizzle that sells. The sizzle is the same for prime rib or ground round, filet mignon or road kill. Shame on the board for being distracted by the sizzle and not checking out the goods.

On Management, written in cooperation with The Center for Human Function & Work (CHF&W) in Boulder, examines critical issues about managing the human side of a business. Joe Rosse is associate professor of management at CU-Boulder and as associate of the CHF&W. Bob Levin is director of the CHF&W. Comments, questions and topics are encouraged and can be mailed to The Business Report or e-mailed to Joseph.Rosse@Colorado.Edu.

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