Feigning interest: Will job applicants fake what they love to get a job?
Defined as the love and passion people have for certain work activities and the environment, vocational interest has been shown to successfully predict how well people perform in the workplace. However, will job applicants honestly report their vocational interests when they are told that their responses will be assessed for hiring decisions?
The answer is likely to be “No,” based on an experiment conducted by SIOP member Mengyang Cao, a doctoral candidate in industrial-organizational psychology at University of Illinois, with his collaborators, Jonathan Phan, Chelsea Song, Seonghee Cho, and Fellow Fritz Drasgow.