WASHINGTON, DC – MARCH 09: SpaceX founder and chief engineer Elon Musk speaks at the 2020 Satellite Conference and Exhibition on March 9, 2020 in Washington, DC. Musk answered a series of questions related to SpaceX projects during his appearance at the conference. (Photo by Win McNamee / Getty Images)
Photo: Win McNamee / Getty Images
Elon Musk has revealed that there is a question he always asks candidates in job interviews to find out whether they are lying or not.
As head of Tesla, SpaceX and co-founder and founder of Neuralink and The Boring Company, the 49-year-old entrepreneur clearly knows what he is doing when it comes to business.
It has also become recently richest person in the world With a net worth of over £ 136 billion, it’s no wonder everyone wants to know their secrets, including when it comes to hiring employees.
Musk does not want to know what school a future employee went to, not even their level of education, the Daily Star reports.
“You don’t even have to have a college degree, not even high school,” Musk said during a 2014 interview with Auto Bild.
Instead, look for “Certificate of Exceptional Competence” when it comes to hiring new staff.
“If there is a record of exceptional performance, it is likely to continue in the future,” he said.
It’s easy for someone to lie on their resume or achievements, of course, but Musk does a question designed to catch liars.
At the World Government Summit in 2017, Musk admitted that he asks every candidate who interviews the same question: “Tell me about some of the toughest problems you’ve worked on and how you solved them.”
A study published in the Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition in December 2020 discovered several approaches to detecting liars based on a job interview technique that actually supports Musk’s technique.
One of these methods is called “Asymmetric Information Management” (AIM) and is intended to provide the interviewee with a clear means to prove innocence or guilt to the investigator by providing detailed information.
“Small details are the lifeblood of forensics and can provide investigators with facts to verify and testify for discussion,” he wrote. Cody Porter, one of the authors of the study and senior lecturer at the University of Portsmouth, in an article for The Conversation.
Interviewers should give the interviewees clear instructions that “if they make longer and more detailed statements about the event of interest, the investigator will be better able to detect whether they are telling the truth or lying.
On the contrary, liars want to hide their guilt, ”Porter explained.
“This means they are more likely to hold information strategically in response to the AIM method.
“Your assumption is that by providing more information, the researcher can more easily spot your lietherefore it usually provides less information ”.
The study also found the use of AIM method can increase the chances of detecting liars by nearly 70%.
Musk added in the interview with Auto Bild that what he really wants to know is whether a candidate solved the problem he claimed was solved.
“And of course you want to make sure that if there were significant accomplishments, was they really responsible for their performance or was someone else responsible for it?
“Most of the time, someone who has really struggled with a problem really understands it [los detalles] and he does not forget, ”he concluded.