Detecting Applicant Faking With a Context-Specific Overclaiming Questionnaire

Abstract: In the context of personnel selection, self-reports are often biased by social desirability. For example, applicants may overstate their knowledge to make a good impression on a potential employer. Overclaiming questionnaires (OCQs) offer a means to assess whether applicants claim to have knowledge that they do not have. Previous studies evaluating whether OCQs are capable of detecting faking in personnel selection contexts reported mixed results but did not take the fit between the content of OCQ items and the selection context into account. In the present study, we therefore tailored an OCQ to the specific application context and compared its performance to that of Residualized Individual Change Scores (RICS), a competing measure of faking based on an achievement motivation questionnaire. A total of 123 participants first answered the OCQ and the motivational questionnaire in a control condition without application context. The two measures were then completed again as part of a mock application process, and participants were asked to honestly report their faking behavior afterward. Participants exhibited more overclaiming in the application context than in the control condition. The OCQ and RICS scores predicted participants’ self-reported faking with comparable accuracy. These results suggest that OCQs can compete with other measures of faking if their content is appropriately tailored to the application context.