Elon Musk is today the richest person in the world.** The founder of Tesla and SpaceX** is surely going to other things far removed from what he is the daily management of your staff and new hires. But there was a time when it wasn’t.
During his early years, Musk was not only responsible for hiring his direct reports, but also the most ordinary employees. And there, he made it very clear what his number one priority was to know whether to hire someone or not.
According to Elon Musk, it is not about the university in which someone trained or their level of education. “You don’t even need to have a college degree, not even a high school degree,” the Tesla CEO said during a 2014 interview with Auto Bild.
Instead, Musk seeks “evidence of exceptional ability” in the form of projects that you have carried out before hiring. “If there’s a track record of exceptional achievement, then that’s likely to continue into the future,” she said.
How Elon Musk detects who is telling the truth with his achievements
The problem is that anyone can claim to be the best at what they do, but it can be hard to tell if they’re telling the truth.
Luckily, Musk once said what his particular trick was to know if someone was telling him the truth or not.
He asks the same question of every candidate he interviews: “Tell me about some of the toughest problems you’ve worked on and how you’ve solved them”.
Because, he argues, “the people who actually solved the problem know exactly how they solved it,” he said. “They know and can describe the small details.”
Asymmetric information, the method on which Elon Musk is based
Musk’s method is based on the idea that someone who makes a false claim will lack the ability to convincingly back it up, so he wants to hear how they solved a thorny issue, step by step.
A study published in Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition in December 2020 discovered several approaches to detect the liars based on a job interview technique that, curiously, endorses the effectiveness of what Musk has been doing for years.
One of these techniques, called “Asymmetric Information Management”, is designed so that the interviewee has a clear means of proving their innocence or guilt to the investigator by providing detailed information.
The researchers found that truth tellers often try to prove their innocence and often provide more detailed information in response to such instructions.
“In contrast, liars want to hide their guilt,” says the study.
The study also found that using the method can increase the probability of detecting liars by almost 70%.
As Musk said in the interview with Auto Bild, what he really wants to know is whether a candidate actually solved the problem that he claimed to have solved.
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