If you watched the Fox crime drama, Lie to me*, popular a few years ago, you may have been attracted to the concept the show drove home every week, that liars can’t help but give themselves away. There are common “tells” among many people being untruthful, in body language or eye contact or rambling responses, but those clues aren’t sure indicators of lying, since factors such as self confidence, culture and even room temperature can also impact how a person carries him or herself.
SHRM recently offered tips for spotting a misleading or dishonest employee or interviewee:
Get a “body language baseline” early in the interview. Start off with small talk or otherwise by discussing non-threatening topics and use this interaction to determine how the person acts and speaks when there’s no incentive to lie. If the person’s body language and speaking style changes significantly when you get into weightier matters, it might point to deceit. Also keep an eye out for subconscious answers that contradict spoken responses, such as nodding while replying in the negative.
Use a different interviewing style. Changing the questions you ask can make it more difficult for the other person to deceive you. In an interview, for example, rather than limiting your questions strictly to the experience featured on the resume, ask the candidate to walk you through their entire job history verbally. This may unearth positions that didn’t end well or that point to possible instability.
Additionally, applicants may be more forthcoming if they believe you’ve already conducted a background check. Joseph Buckley, president of a firm that specializes in training people to conduct investigative interviews, suggests beginning the interview with a statement akin to “It’s important that what you tell us during this interview is consistent with what we’ve learned.”
Another example Buckley points to is, instead of asking whether someone has been convicted of a crime – conviction doesn’t necessarily follow when a person breaks the law – ask whether they’ve “ever done anything against the law… You’d be surprised how many applicants with actually start talking.”
Listen for evasive answers. Long-winded responses that don’t really answer the question can be a red flag. One explanation for this behavior is that the person is flustered; another is that they know their answer could be incriminating. Buckley said, when answering hard-hitting questions such as Have you ever been fired?, “the honest ones, they don’t care, because they can answer truthfully.”
Published by Conselium Executive Search, the global leader in compliance search.
