Editorial: Impression Management and Faking in Job Interviews

Organizations place a great deal of emphasis on hiring individuals who are a good fit for the organization and the job. Among the many ways that individuals are screened for a job, the employment interview is particularly prevalent and nearly universally used (Macan, 2009; Huffcutt and Culbertson, 2011). This Research Topic is devoted to a construct that plays a critical role in our understanding of job interviews: impression management (IM). In the interview context, IM describes behaviors an individual uses to influence the impression that others have of them (Bozeman and Kacmar, 1997). For instance, a job applicant can flatter an interviewer to be seen as likable (i.e., ingratiation), play up their qualifications and abilities to be seen as competent (i.e., self-promotion), or utilize excuses or justifications to make up for a negative event or error (i.e., defensive IM; Ellis et al., 2002). IM has emerged as a central theme in the interview literature over the last several decades (for reviews, see Posthuma et al., 2002; Levashina et al., 2014). Despite some pioneering early work (e.g., Schlenker, 1980; Leary and Kowalski, 1990; Stevens and Kristof, 1995), there has been a resurgence of interest in the area over the last decade. While the literature to date has set up a solid foundational knowledge about interview IM, there are a number of emerging trends and directions. In the following, we lay out some critical areas of inquiry in interview IM, and highlight how the innovative set of papers in this Research Topic is illustrative of these new directions.