“Social Desirability” refers to the natural human tendency to respond to self-report questions in a manner that allows them to be viewed favourably by themselves or others. Socially desirable responding can come in the form of over-reporting desirable qualities and behaviours, and/or under-reporting undesirable qualities and behaviours. This phenomenon tends to occur even when the respondent knows that honest answering is in their best interest. Have you ever found yourself fudging the numbers a bit when your doctor asks you about your red meat intake? Your sodium intake? Your alcohol intake? Have you ever been dishonest when your dentist asks you how often you floss your teeth? In all of these scenarios, your medical care provider will be better able to provide care with an accurate picture of your health and lifestyle than with an overly favorable picture. Nevertheless, we are often tempted to make ourselves seem more favorable in the eyes of others.
Socially desirable responding can occur at a number of stages in the recruitment process, particularly at interview. In a job interview, we try to present as our best selves, and frame ourselves as exactly what the recruiter is looking for. And why wouldn’t we? Everyone else is doing that! We’d never find a job if we didn’t! But in reality, what recruiters see at interview is never what actually fills the role. It’s impossible to be your best self every day, or else your best self would be your average self. We’re able to stretch our personalities to be exactly what our employers want for a while, but eventually we must regress to our true selves. This is part of the reason why unstructured job interviews are considered one of the least valid methods of predicting future success in the workplace. What organizations need to know when hiring is what a new recruit looks like on an average day, because most of their days will be average days. Since there is such a large gap between what recruiters see at interview and what the organization actually gets, we can say that unstructured job interviews are a biased measure of future employee performance.
Social desirability is also a meaningful threat to the validity of the self-report psychometric assessments that are frequently used in recruitment. When asked, using a 5-point scale, how “honest” or “unbiased” we are, most people will report themselves as a 4 or 5. The tendency to rate ourselves favorably is amplified when these questions are posed in the context of a job application. If we have beliefs about what responses recruiters are looking for from prospective candidates, we are more likely to respond that way, independent of the truth. And this tendency makes sense: when responding to personality questionnaires as job applicants, our ultimate goal is not to provide an accurate personality profile for recruiters to examine, it’s to convince recruiters to offer us a job. Psychometric assessments with strong social desirability characteristics like this effectively become useless: If it’s obvious what the desired responses are, everyone provides the same responses which, in turn, don’t differentiate between candidates.
When selecting an assessment to use in your organization, it is critical to consider whether the questions posed encourage socially desirable responding.
Our TRAITS For Hiring assessment was designed with social desirability in mind, allowing you to be confident that you’re measuring what you’re trying to measure, and not just what job applicants think you want to hear. To learn more about how we design our items, check out “Minimizing Social Desirability in The TRAITS Pre-Hire Psychometric Assessment.” Are you looking for a new pre-hire talent assessment to use in your organization? Give us a call today!
