Can people cheat Plum?

While there is a lot of advice on how to lie on resumes, ace interviews, and write excellent cover letters, applicants are just as likely to worsen their match to a role as they are to improve their match to a role if they fake their Plum responses.

The technology of Plum is extremely difficult to fake or cheat. Our research shows that when people were motivated to improve their match to a desired role, they were unable to reliably do so.

Plum uses forced choice and other limited response options to ensure that individuals who are being screened for a given position cannot produce overly positive responses. Plum leverages a series of test taking methodologies to help prevent gaming/faking. The foremost strategy is the “forced-choice methodology” which asks individuals to choose statements that are most or least like them. This means that for every behavioral question, an individual must conceded to one behavior being less like them than the rest.

Plum’s algorithm is complex and assesses several overlapping behaviors that determine the Talents. Our ipsative methodology, which forces test takers to select the most probable and the least probable response, creates a hierarchy of values that is very hard to game.

The individual also will not have any idea of what the criteria for success has been defined as, making it very difficult for them to select “favorable” answers. Individuals who try to be dishonest during this assessment oftentimes end up with “flatter”, less representative, scores within Talents.

In the end, being honest is the candidate’s best chance!