During job interviews, job seekers often present their experiences in an impressive manner, but simply knowing how to package oneself is not enough. Interviewers not only want to understand your resume but also assess whether you truly have the skills or are just good at presenting yourself. Tesla CEO Elon Musk has his own interview method, including a question he particularly loves to ask, which research has shown can help identify liars.
Musk once told the German car magazine “Auto Bild” that when selecting talent, it is not important to him where the applicant graduated from or what degrees they hold. He believes that one does not necessarily need a university degree, or even a high school diploma, to work for his company. What he values more is whether the applicant can demonstrate outstanding abilities.
At the 2017 World Government Summit, Musk mentioned that anyone can claim to have exceptional abilities, but verifying whether they actually possess them is not an easy task. Therefore, he always asks a question during interviews: “Tell me about a difficult problem you have faced and how you solved it.”
He requests applicants to describe in detail the process of solving the challenging problem to verify whether they personally handled the situations they claim to have resolved or if others played a significant role.
Musk stated that if applicants fabricate their responses, it is difficult for them to provide specific details to support their claims. “Those who have truly resolved problems will have a clear understanding of how they did it. They know the details and can describe them concretely,” he said. “Individuals who have struggled and worked hard to solve problems will remember the details vividly.”
“If a person has had outstanding achievements in the past, they are likely to continue delivering excellent performances in the future.”
Interestingly, research has confirmed that Musk’s method of determining whether someone is lying is quite effective.
A study published in the “Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition” found that specific interview questions help in identifying liars, using a method called Asymmetric Information Management (AIM). By encouraging interviewees to provide detailed information, interviewers can determine whether they are being forthright or withholding information.
Cody Porter, senior researcher and author at the University of Portsmouth in the UK, stated that “details are crucial in forensic investigations as they provide investigators with facts to verify and witnesses to question. Importantly, longer and more detailed statements usually contain more clues revealing deceptive behavior.”
She suggested that interviewers clearly instruct job seekers to provide as complete and detailed an account of events as possible to determine if they are being truthful. The study found that using the AIM method, truthful individuals tend to offer more details voluntarily to prove their innocence, while liars tend to provide less detail as they believe that the more they say, the more likely they are to expose inconsistencies.
The research team also discovered that using the AIM method increased the probability of identifying liars by nearly 70%.
(This article referenced reports from CNBC and Yahoo! Finance.)