Autor: Liliya Ivanova member of the VAP

Selecting and properly deploying reliable personnel minimizes the risks of fraud, informational leakage, and internal threats in all areas of business. Over the past decade, investors and business owners have increasingly resort to polygraph examinations as a way to ensure personnel security.

At the same time, public opinion about polygraph testing is now largely influenced by the media. Entertainment programs increasingly appear that present polygraph testing in a simplified or sensationalized manner. This presentation gives viewers a distorted view of the capabilities, nature, and purpose of our profession. The television format emphasizes drama, speed, and spectacle, creating the impression that the polygraph is a device that instantly detects lies, while in reality, it is merely a tool for psychological diagnosis and the detection of hidden information.

The simplification of polygraph examinations, a simplified approach to solving professional problems, often results in the vulgarization of research, with a “test” being conducted instead of a full-fledged process, which includes a number of mandatory steps, from a thorough investigation of the circumstances of an event and questionnaire preparation to the writing of conclusions. These negative processes are often associated with the entry of people into the profession under the slogans: “Being a polygraph examiner is financially profitable!” and “We don’t say ‘no’ to clients!”

Completing initial training by correspondence clearly contributes to a critical misunderstanding of the content and purpose of the polygraph examiner profession. Those who want to “easily change their lives” and “start earning a lot of money” without leaving “work, home, or the kitchen” usually fail to realize that mastering the profession isn’t just about learning how to use polygraph software, that a polygraph isn’t a “milking machine” for reactions. For such people, it’s common to conduct 6 to 8 or more “tests” per day, as they earn money by quantity (receiving payments based on output), not quality. Their staggering work rate directly threatens the personnel security of their client’s business, which, in wartime, manifests itself not only in industrial espionage by missed “insiders” LINK, but also in actual “incursions” into classified production facilities.

In this situation, polygraph test customers, on the one hand, see quick solutions to complex problems on television using a polygraph, while on the other, they experience cognitive dissonance from the fact that the polygraph somehow doesn’t benefit their business. The duration of the awareness that something is wrong depends greatly on a number of factors:

– the extent to which the owner is involved in the business;

– the personal maturity, responsibility, and morality of the employees responsible for monitoring and analyzing the work of the polygraph examiners involved;

– whether there is collusion between HR, the company’s recruiters, and the polygraph examiners involved.

And the issue here isn’t even the ill-fated “kickback,” which, obviously, does sometimes occur. Typically, a company’s HR staff pay is largely dependent on bonuses, which are tied to the number of vacancies filled. In a climate where money is paramount, the safety aspect of the polygraph is inevitably negated in the eyes of some HR professionals and recruiters, and “administering a polygraph” in 40 minutes followed by a monotonous, repeatable conclusion becomes the norm. The losers are the investors and business owners.

A professional polygraph examination is based on standardized methods, meticulous preparation, and comprehensive analysis of the obtained data, and its quality directly depends on the polygraph examiner’s professional level, knowledge, skills, and abilities.

In my own work abroad, I’ve repeatedly encountered situations where company employees underwent polygraph tests after internal incidents and, as a result, were accused of involvement in theft or leaking confidential information, which, in fact, they had not committed. Repeated polygraph tests yielded different results and prevented unfounded and unfair personnel decisions. Specifically, this concerns situations where the initial testing may have failed to adequately consider:

– the respondent’s mental state at the time of the study;

– the respondent’s level of emotional stress and exhaustion;

– character stigma;

– national and cultural differences;

– atypical individual physiological reactions.

Some of the problems were related to:

– an initially inaccurately stated task from the client;

– writing tests based on distorted initial information about the event;

– the specialist’s agreement to conduct the study under conditions of a lack of information necessary for writing the tests;

– the client’s submission of an excessively large number of questions to the polygraph examiner and the latter’s inability to refuse.

In a number of cases, repeat testing has prevented serious errors that could have led to job losses and negative consequences for the reputations of wrongly accused employees.

Given the above, it appears that one of the key tasks of the professional community today is to promote adherence to professional standards and ethical principles for polygraph examiners—one that distinguishes professional activity from the media image, which is, in part, created by unscrupulous, homegrown “polygraph marketers.”