The most honest man I ever knew was a dry drunk that managed the parking lot that I worked at as a youth. He spoke to me about being polygraphed for a potential job and he was asked “would you ever be tempted to steal from the warehouse; he replied “yes I would be tempted but I never would do it”. He passed the polygraph but didn’t get the job because of his truthful answer. The man never broke a law or even had a speeding ticket or stole anything in his life as far as I knew and he was fair and honest with his word.
So much for polygraphs. If your friend had been honest however about the DUI, would he still have gotten the job? After all any back ground clearances(prior to poly) should have exposed the DUI even before the Poly.
When Six Sigma came out our company decided to apply it to software. Management was going to use the statistics for software and process improvement. Or so they said. We thought it was a joke because they couldn’t define what a line of code was. We suggested they count semicolons for the C code because you could write a whole program on one line.
Anyway, they flew us up in groups for the training. Now the group I was in was paired with a group from our Canadian division, which was making money hand over fist for the company. None of them would get fired for asking embarrassing questions in the training. Also they were great to go to the bars with. It was in the bars that we fed the Canadiens the questions that begged asking like, “What’s the statistical chance that Management will misuse these statistics?”