Applicant Faking in Personality Measurements ; The faking-resistance of ipsative and normative measurements in a selection process

Abstract

Personality measurements are popular in selection processes; meaning applicant faking has arisen as a potential problem. There are two classifications for personality measurements: ipsative and normative. The latter creates concerns with applicant faking and the ease by which applicants could manipulate their scores. Recent research suggests ipsative measurements as a remedy to faking behavior and that ipsative measurements generate normative trait information. In the current research, good construct validity, and consistent scores across experimental manipulations support these findings on ipsative measurements. In addition, ipsative measurements show a higher potential to cope with applicant faking than normative measurements, as they were less inflated in a real selection process. However, it is difficult to clearly suggest ipsative measurements as the most prominent method when hiring employees, as the normative measurement were not largely inflated, even though it showed more weakness than the ipsative measurement. Interestingly, warnings given to applicants before conducting personality measurements showed signs of adjusting for faking behavior by lowering mean scores of the normative measurements more than for ipsative measurements. Results suggest that the ipsative format could be a method to address the problem, but warnings also show promising results.