In 1998, Frank Schmidt and John Hunter published a meta-analysis of eighty-five years of research on how well assessments predict performance.85 They looked at nineteen different assessment techniques and found that typical, unstructured job interviews were pretty bad at predicting how someone would perform once hired. Unstructured interviews have an r2 of 0.14, meaning that they can explain only 14 percent of an employee’s performance.xxiii This is somewhat ahead of reference checks (explaining 7 percent of performance), ahead of the number of years of work experience (3 percent), and well
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