interviewing by David E. Zulawski, CFI, CFE and Shane G. Sturman, CFI, CPP
Looking Back Over Ten Years O ur favorite magazine is ten years old. Ten years! These years have gone by so quickly. Congratulations to Jim Lee, Jack Trlica, and the LP Magazine staff for ten years of providing good reading and a visionary platform of communication for the industry. Things seem to slip through the cracks in the rush of cases and day-to-day business. We poured over LP Magazine’s last issue, which contained a timeline of loss prevention for the last ten years. What a flood of memories—people, places, cases, new ideas. What a ten years it was. Thank you for letting this column be part of the magazine’s success. The publisher has kindly agreed to renew our column for another year. Dave’s high school English teacher, Mrs. Polack, would be sooooo astounded! Having read Dave’s essays for four years, she was ready to take an early retirement. How often can you write Rule 19a at the top of a paper and not become bored. For the uninitiated, Rule 19a equals “trite.” According to Mrs. Polack, trite means “lacking in freshness or effectiveness because of constant use; [oh no] cliché.” We hope you have found something interesting or useful in our columns, despite Mrs. Polack’s critique. We have written almost sixty columns, ranging from the interpretation of behavior to report writing and testimony. We have addressed questions from the field along with career development. Each of these areas helped us better understand the interview process and how it applies in our industry.
Admissions and Implications
From our readers’ comments, we found they particularly appreciated our commentary on the interview process. One of the areas that we discussed in some detail over several issues was the development of an admission and eliciting admissions of other employees’ theft activity. When we started to think about the development process we initially looked at it as the endgame of the interview. However, after we started to draft the column, our thinking on the topic became markedly different. Instead of the endgame of the interview, development is strongly tied to how the interview is begun and the strategies employed in the opening moments of the conversation. For example, if the interviewer elected to use a direct accusation—accusing the dishonest associate of stealing what was known from the investigation—the resulting admission tended to be lower, because the associate knew or strongly
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March – April 2011
Zulawski and Sturman are executives in the investigative and training firm of Wicklander-Zulawski & Associates (www.w-z.com). Zulawski is a senior partner and Sturman is president. Sturman is also a member of ASIS International’s Retail Loss Prevention Council. They can be reached at 800-222-7789 or via email at dzulawski@w-z.com and ssturman@w-z.com. © 2011 Wicklander-Zulawski & Associates, Inc.
suspected what the investigation had revealed. The direct accusation also failed to gather intelligence from the dishonest employee’s behavior about other methods of theft activity at the company. In addition, the direct accusation increased the level of resistance to an admission by encouraging the dishonest associate to make denials. The direct accusation also revealed strongly what the investigator knew and, once it was revealed, it limited the interviewer’s ability to determine when the subject was still lying. By revealing his evidence early, the investigator helps the subject identify the limits of the investigator’s knowledge. The subject then knows what he may continue to conceal. Another column addressed an additional problem area related to development—obtaining implications of other employees involved in theft activities. Previous research at Service Merchandise Corporation in the 1980s indicated about 20 percent of their employees had knowledge of other people stealing at the organization. In order to explore how an interviewer might increase his implications, we decided to examine our case files to determine the frequency of implications. An examination of Wicklander-Zulawski and Associates case files indicated about 30 percent of employees made implications about another associate stealing. An interesting sidenote related to our examination of the files was the age dispersion of the employees who had knowledge of others stealing. We found that the employees in the 18- to 25-year-old range accounted for 72 percent of the people with knowledge. Those employees between ages 26 and 32 accounted for an additional 17 percent. When these two groups are combined they account for almost 90 percent of the employees who admitted knowing of another associate involved in theft activity. Clearly, one can assume that the greatest level of theft and knowledge of theft activity comes from the younger population. If we go back to Dr. Hollinger’s early research on employee theft, we find a similar high-risk group in the late teens through mid-20s identified as being thieves.
Statistics of Success for the Wicklander-Zulawski Method
Another important statistic came to light when we examined our files for audios and videos we had reviewed for companies. We were primarily looking for whether or not the interviewer had used our non-confrontational approach |
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