DEEP DIVE: What Can We Do About Faking in Personality Tests?
The Reality We All Know
Let’s start with the reality everyone in recruitment knows but few say out loud.
When a candidate sits a personality test for a job they really want, some of them will answer in a way that makes them look better. Not wildly dishonest. Not fraudulent. Just polished. A little more resilient. A little more organised. A little less reactive under pressure.
It is human. And it creates a serious problem.
Personality assessments are used because they work. Decades of research show that certain traits reliably predict job performance, engagement, and leadership effectiveness. Organisations use these tools not only to make selection decisions, but also to inform onboarding, team composition, development plans and succession pipelines. The value of all of that rests on one assumption: the data reflects the person.
But what happens when it doesn’t?
If responses are shaped by what candidates think the organisation wants to see, the signal weakens. Rankings can shift. Predictive accuracy drops. Subtle risk factors disappear. And downstream insights, the ones used for coaching, culture fit and team alignment, begin to rest on unstable ground.
TALY’S making it easier than ever to use profiling, from selection, all the way to onboarding. We ensure a good fit turns into a great contributor.
Want to learn more about how TALY is helping to reshape great decision-making and outcomes during recruitment? Get in touch or book a demo today.
The Complication: Faking Is Rational
This is the core problem. We rely on personality data to make high-stakes decisions, yet the assessment context itself gives applicants a reason to manage impressions.
The complication is that faking is often rational. When the stakes are high, when a job offer could change someone’s life, and when there appears to be no real downside to polishing responses, why wouldn’t some candidates do it?
Simply asking people to “answer honestly” is naïve. At the same time, abandoning personality testing is not an option. The evidence supporting its predictive value is too strong.
So the question becomes practical and strategic: what can we do about it?
What the Research Actually Shows
The most comprehensive recent evidence comes from a 2024 meta-analysis that examined data from nearly 50,000 participants across dozens of studies. The researchers were not asking whether faking exists. That debate is long settled. They were asking whether anything reliably reduces it.
The answer is yes.
When candidates receive an integrity warning before completing a personality assessment, socially desirable responding decreases. Not trivially, but meaningfully. Even moderate reductions in score inflation can improve rank order accuracy and strengthen the link between assessment results and real-world performance.
However, nuance matters. Not all warnings are equal.
The strongest effects occur when the warning does three things at once. First, it explains why honesty matters, for example, that results inform not only selection but also onboarding and development. Second, it signals that responses are monitored for consistency, making it clear that distortion can be detected. Third, it states that dishonest responding may have consequences, such as reassessment or removal from consideration.
When these elements are combined, candidates are subtly but powerfully repositioned. The incentive to fake weakens because the perceived opportunity narrows, the motivation shifts, and the cost of distortion becomes visible. Warnings that only threaten consequences are less effective. Threat alone is blunt. Thoughtful design, grounded in behavioural science, is far more powerful.
TALY’s Research-Led Solution
This is where TALY’s approach is deliberate.
We do not treat integrity warnings as a compliance add-on. We treat them as a core design feature of a modern assessment system. Before a candidate begins a TALY assessment, they are clearly informed that their responses extend beyond selection into onboarding and development. They are told that answer patterns are reviewed for consistency. They understand that inconsistent responding may lead to reassessment. And they are reminded that this process exists to ensure fairness for everyone involved.
This is not about intimidation. It is about transparency. It reframes the assessment as a shared commitment to accuracy and fairness rather than a test to be gamed. And this lines up with our philosophy of being a talent intelligence platform, a faked personality result leads to different expectations in onboarding, feedback, and coaching.
Crucially, we did not stop at implementing what the literature recommends. We measured the impact internally. Since introducing our research-based integrity warning system, we have observed a significant drop in socially desirable responding compared to our previous model. The effect is not theoretical. It is measurable.
Cleaner data leads to stronger predictive power. Stronger predictive power leads to better selection decisions. And when personality insights are later used for onboarding, development and team optimisation, their value compounds.
Building on the Latest Research
Faking in personality tests will never disappear entirely. As long as employment decisions matter, impression management will exist. But the idea that nothing can be done is outdated.
The evidence shows that careful, research-informed design changes behaviour. At TALY, we have built our assessment architecture around that principle. We combine contemporary psychometrics, behavioural science and ongoing internal validation to protect the integrity of the data from the start.
Because when we reduce faking, we are not simply improving a test. We are strengthening every decision that follows.
Get in touch to find out more… we really do love talking about this stuff. Or Book a Demo today to see how easy it is to start using TALY in your business.
