When recruiters don't have a polygraph lie-detector machine, they can ask this simple question from the job seekers and observe their response.
In fiction and art, lies become a medium to entertain and express the truth. But when it comes to real-life situations, lies can take a huge toll. Companies can collapse. There are already various methods to detect lies, such as the polygraph test, and the fMRI brain-mapping test but Tesla co-founder and CEO Elon Musk practices something else during the hiring process. In the 2017 World Government Summit held in Dubai, Elon Musk revealed the simple yet outstanding lie-detection method he uses while recruiting candidates for his projects. On social media, his method gained much popularity.
Musk is known as one of the leading business figures around the world. The billionaire has founded space company SpaceX and is presently the CEO of another company, Tesla. He is also the owner of X (previously Twitter). But apparently, he is an expert lie detector too. During the summit, Musk was asked how he would recruit candidates to go on a manned mission to Mars. He answered that his choice would mainly depend on his gut feeling, but he would also use certain questions to make the final decision. “My interview questions are always the same,” he explained, adding: “I say tell me the story of your life and the decisions you made along the way and why you made them.”
After the introduction segment, he asks the candidates a crucial question, “Tell me about some of the most difficult problems you worked on and how you solved them.” Unfolding the reason why he asks this question, the entrepreneur said, “The people who really solved the problem know exactly how they solved it. They know and can describe the little details.”
At the same time, lying candidates would not go into detail or they would be using someone else’s story, “The people that pretended to solve the problem can maybe go one level and then they get stuck!” Therefore, this is a good question to spot the liars, he proclaimed. Various studies confirm the effectiveness of Musk’s job interviewing technique.
Research published in Nature Journal indicates that when a person is innocent, their innocence will reflect in their verbal cues. The reason to back up this claim was, that deception is cognitively more demanding than truth-telling, given the additional cognitive processes engaged during lying. Lying is more effort-taking than truth-telling. So when interviewing, the recruiters should see if a candidate is “narrating the events exactly as they occurred,” or if there are signs of manipulations.
Since lying requires more cognitive effort than telling the truth, liars have to constantly monitor themselves and ensure that their story doesn’t contradict itself. So, researchers say, if the recruiter increases the cognitive load on a person, they can get to a point where the liar can’t handle the extra stress, but the truth-teller can. One way of doing this is by asking candidates to narrate their stories, for example, a recent sales deal they closed, something similar to what Musk described.
Another scientific property behind Musk’s question is that it makes candidates spill out detailed statements about their work experience. And according to the Asymmetric Information Management lie-detection technique, described in Nature Journal, the more detailed statements are, the more easily they can be classified as genuine or fabricated.
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