Anyone with experience in hiring can tell you that it can often feel like a guessing game. The typical process includes reviewing applications and/or resumes and talking to candidates on the phone and in person. And, at the end of it all, you still aren’t always sure if the individual is the right person for the job. You wish for a crystal ball that can tell you definitively if someone is going to be a good hire. Unfortunately, a hiring magic crystal ball does not exist, but adding an assessment to your process can provide a lot more accuracy than you might think. Many people wonder if the cost and time associated with an assessment is really worth it. How accurate can an assessment be? Let’s take a look at how well-designed and validated pre-employment assessment tools predict performance and compare that to well-known relationships and other common selection tools.

The statistic used to evaluate the accuracy of an assessment tool is called a correlation. A correlation is a number from -1.0 to +1.0 that indicates the strength of the relationship between two variables (e.g., assessment score and job performance). The closer the number is to 1.0, the stronger the relationship. The direction of the relationship is indicated by the positive and the negative sign. A positive relationship means that as one variable goes up, so does the other one (e.g., temperature and ice cream sales). A negative relationship means that as one goes up the other goes down (e.g., temperature and down jacket sales). When trying to predict and explain human behavior, correlations close to 1.0 are practically impossible. However, over the past few decades I/O Psychologists have thoroughly studied predictors of job performance and have a good idea of how to reliably measure underlying characteristics and candidate behavior that can accurately predict job performance.

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