Hiring Success The Art and Science of Staffing Assessment and Employee Selection
Steven Hunt
A non-technical guide explaining what staffing assessments are, why they work, and how to use them to make more accurate, efficient, fair, and legally defensible hiring decisions.
Staffing assessments—personality measures, ability tests, background checks, structured interviews, and work simulations—are used to evaluate millions of job candidates each year, yet few people understand how they actually work or why they outperform intuition-based hiring. Written by industrial-organizational psychologist Steven Hunt, Hiring Success bridges the gap between dense scientific research and oversimplified vendor white papers, offering a thorough but accessible explanation of assessment science. The book shows that human behavior is remarkably consistent over time, which is why well-designed assessments can predict future job performance months or years in advance far more accurately than unstructured interviews or resume reviews. It walks readers through what assessments measure (what candidates have done, can do, and want to do), how to evaluate their validity and business value, how to answer common criticisms, and how to integrate assessments into hiring processes for both entry-level and professional jobs. The result is a practical toolkit for anyone who wants to hire better employees while treating candidates fairly.
The model it argues
A causal model describing how the design and use of valid staffing assessments, applied under favorable conditions (candidate pool size, performance variance), lead to measurement of candidate attributes that predict job-relevant behaviors and ultimately improve hiring accuracy, workforce quality, and organizational financial outcomes.
Key ideas
- Assessment Validity
- The extent to which a staffing assessment accurately measures job-relevant attributes and predicts actual job performance and tenure.
- Assessment Design and Deployment Quality
- How well an assessment is built, grounded in job analysis, standardized, and appropriately scored to enable consistent and accurate data collection and interpretation.
- Candidate Pool Size
- The number of eligible candidates considered per opening, driving how many selection decisions must be made per hire.
- Job Performance Variance
- The financial difference in value between high- and low-performing employees in a given job.
- Candidate Attributes
- The enduring, often genetically influenced characteristics of candidates—experience, personality, ability, motives, interests—that assessments measure.
- Job-Relevant Employee Behaviors
- The productive and counterproductive on-the-job behaviors driven by candidate attributes that determine performance outcomes.
- Hiring Decision Accuracy
- The degree to which selection decisions correctly identify future successful employees and screen out likely failures.
- Candidate Reactions and Experience
- How favorably candidates perceive the assessment process regarding fairness, relevance, length, and invasiveness.