The Problem with Confessions

Plenty about my life has changed since I retired from the Bureau. I spend a lot more time behind a chainsaw and in the garden (as everyone is by now tired of hearing). One thing hasn't changed at all: I still spend nearly every working hour talking with people about interviewing…and the criticality of confessions. If anything I hear more about it now, because my audiences aren't self-selected the way they once were. A lot of the people in my current classes are perfectly happy with the old way of doing things — and by "old way" I mean the way most of the big interview-training companies still teach today. And they are happy with it because they get confessions.

The old approaches work in exactly the way they are designed to work. They get confessions. And nearly every interviewer I meet is certain that getting confessions is the job.

But that isn't the job. The job is to bring value to the organization and to solve crimes — but that's not what they've been trained to believe. They've been trained, rewarded, and evaluated on exactly one thing: go in, get the confession, make the problem go away. High confession rate, good interviewer, bonus earned. Clean incentive, tight feedback loop.

Which is the whole problem.

The number that makes an interviewer look good is quietly making them worse. Judged only on confessions, they're a star. Judged on what the interview was actually worth to the organization, most interviews leave most of their value on the table.

And let's be honest — walking someone out the door is worth almost nothing to the company. The value is in the information: the bigger picture, the shifting ecosystem, the why behind the what. That information is the entire reason to be in the room. Every single time.

Most standardized interview methods have the interviewer talking about 75 percent of the time. The interviewee gets the other 25, and even that is spent boxed into the single action under question. Responses get cut off. The conversation gets "refocused." Anything outside the incident is treated as noise.

I read a transcript this week where the interviewee tried to raise a separate matter they wanted to share — and was told, "that's not what we're here to talk about." Information lost. Confession gained.

And often the confession itself isn't even accurate. They have confessed to something that did not happen in the way it has been laid out for them. Minimize what someone did, and they'll confess — to the minimized version. Equally bad is the forced choice: hand someone two versions of what happened, one of them a palatable, face-saving option, and of course they take it — "yeah, dude, that's exactly how it happened" — and they're out of the room as fast as they can manage.

The confession comes either way, just not to what actually happened, and with it goes the chance to learn how it happened, why, what led to it, what made it seem an okay plan, who else was involved, what else is out there. A confession to something that didn't quite occur.

When I talk to leaders in the asset protection world, the information those interviewers are trained to discard is precisely what they're asking for. They want to know what's driving threat trends. They want broad information turned into actionable intelligence so a complex ORC case doesn't drag on for months. They want to understand what's happening inside the corporate culture that's fueling associate-related losses. They want exactly what their own investigators say there's no time to collect.

I won't pretend to know exactly where that disconnect occurs. But the fix isn't a mystery. Point interviewers at information instead of confessions. Reward it. Actually use what they bring back — turn it into intelligence so the value is visible to everyone. And teach them how to run an intelligence interview.

Here's the part that surprises people: an intelligence interview takes no longer than a standard one. You just stop spending half of it performing, and you let the interviewee talk. Let them talk and you get more information.

You also get more confessions.