Social desirability in Recruitment: Why candidates' self assessments tell you more about the job than about them

Oops! I'm Biased

For this episode, Charlotte invited Leonie Grandpierre, Equalture's Head of Science back to cover Social Desirability. Social desirability is the effect of adjusting our behaviour to what we think is more socially acceptable in order to avoid negative judgement. Behaving in socially desirable ways can apply to adhering to political correctness, to how we act on social media, and to hiring situations. Charlotte and Leonie discuss how and why social desirability differs between individuals, if social desirability is a conscious or unconscious process, when it arises most in the hiring process, what effect it has on personality tests, how social desirability impacts high stakes situations versus low stakes situations, why even validated personality tests are sensitive to social desirability, job interviews and social desirability, how game-based assessments can limit social desirability and what strategies there are to minimize social desirability in recruitment.
Unfortunately, we experienced some issues with audio on this episode, and hope that the content can make up for the lack in quality.

References
Problems with controlling for social desirability bias in questionnaires:

• https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/industrial-and-organizational-psychology/arti[…]e-applicant-faking-behavior/6438F216A7B9ADBC59968098F52386BB
• https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2010-04294-004

Differences between high and low stake situations:

• https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S019188691631114X?via%3Dihub
• https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.462.2421&rep=rep1&type=pdf

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