Here's what Elon Musk asks at every interview to spot a liar

Elon Musk has been a lot of things: Enough wealth to make anyone's eyes pop out, internet meme fame, and a kid with the de-facto weirdest name.

Of course, let's not forget his years of experience in building successful enterprises one after another - Neuralink, Tesla, SpaceX to name a few. So it is normal to know that the man knows a thing or two about sorting out the liars who could not make it in interviews.

Musk, according to Daily Star, is not even interested in which school a prospective employee attended. Instead, he looks for "evidence of exceptional ability" when it comes to hiring.

"If there’s a track record of exceptional achievement, then it’s likely that that will continue into the future," he said. But since lying on CVs is not exactly uncommon, how does he sort out the liars?

Musk says he has one question he asks every prospective candidate in interviews: "Tell me about some of the most difficult problems you worked on and how you solved them."

"The people who really solved the problem know exactly how they solved it," he said at the World Government Summit in 2017. "They know and can describe the little details."

And turns out, this trick Musk uses appears to have a basis in science.

A study published in the Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition in December 2020 uncovered several approaches to spotting liars based on a job interviewing technique.
The technique is called "Asymmetric Information Management" or AIM for short.

"At its core, AIM is designed to provide suspects with a clear means to demonstrate their innocence or guilt to investigators by providing detailed information. Small details are the lifeblood of forensic investigations and can provide investigators with facts to check and witnesses to question. Importantly, longer, more detailed statements typically contain more clues to a deception than short statements," wrote Cody Porter, one of the authors of the AIM paper, for The Conversation.

"Interviewers make it clear to interviewees that if they provide longer, more detailed statements about the event of interest, then the investigator will be better able to detect if they are telling the truth or lying. For truth-tellers, this is good news. For liars, this is less good news," she said.

"Truth-tellers typically seek to demonstrate their innocence and commonly provide more detailed information in response to such instructions.

In contrast, liars wish to conceal their guilt. This means they are more likely to strategically withhold information in response to the AIM instructions. Their (totally correct) assumption here is that providing more information will make it easier for the investigator to detect their lie, so instead, they provide less information."

So, if you're sitting opposite Elon Musk in your next interview, you better not be lying - he's going to find out if you are.