About

Fifty notes on assessing skills, for people designing or running selection processes.

The position

Assessment predicts the work to the extent that it resembles the work. That is the most robust finding in a century of selection research and everything here follows from it.

Organisations mostly assess what is convenient to measure. The gap between that and what determines success in the role is where most bad hiring lives.

Every additional stage trades one kind of error for another, and almost nobody makes that trade deliberately.

What is deliberately absent

Precise validity coefficients. A major re-examination found the figures in circulation were inflated by the corrections applied to the original studies. The ordering between methods is more reliable than the numbers, and that is what this collection uses.

Product names and supplier comparisons. The useful distinctions are between methods rather than between vendors.

And any claim that assessment identifies the best candidate. It narrows uncertainty. Processes sold on the stronger claim produce elaborate procedures that cost more than they return.

Nothing here is legal advice

Discrimination, data protection and automated decision rules differ substantially by jurisdiction and change. Take advice on your own position.

About this domain

This address previously carried a discussion forum, which has been removed. There is a page explaining why.