Self-presentation in selection settings: the case of personality tests

Based on theoretical views that applicants express meaningful skills and motivation when presenting themselves in personnel selection settings, we challenge conventional wisdom that self-presentation necessarily impairs the diagnostic value of “fakable” selection devices. Instead, we propose to supplement the traditional psychometric approach to personnel selection with a social perspective that leverages the competitive nature of selection. In order to capture an outcome of self-presentation, we introduce the Ideal Employee Coefficient (IEC) as a supplement to traditional scoring of responses to personality items. Findings imply that traditional personality constructs can be meaningfully aggregated with measures of self-presentation that are cost-effectively derived from the same data sources.