Abstract

Although personality tests have many advantages over personnel selection, there are disputes about using social desirability scales as indicators of faking in selection context. This point is a critical issue to effective selection and performance prediction in trends that personality tests are widely used in selection. This study is based on the question whether social desirability can be the indicators of faking, purposed to understand faking in personality test, systematically. To do so, I examined the usefulness of social desirability scale in the faking research, found faking-prone items in Hogan Personality Inventory, investigated faking-prone items to be differed according to jobs, conceptualized Job Desirability constructs and explored whether it could be differentiated from Social desirability. In addition, I examined the effects of faking according to job desirability on the selection decision. This is based on the researches to reveal that faking has little impact on criterion validity but some impact on selection decision. This study shows four results. First, social desirability scales have many items disable to detect faking, Second, there are faking-prone items in personality test itself. Third, there are different faking-prone items in different jobs, so faking is occurred according to desirability of specific job. Fourth, Job desirability can be differentiated from Social desirability. Finally, when faking-prone items in personality test were used to estimate the abilities(θ) of subjects, there are change in rankings of person is occurred.