Since I've been posting on cognitive science lately, I just wanted to note that the latest Harvard Business Review discusses the use of cognitive measures as a means of evaluating candidates for executives positions. In these tests, the candidate is given a business scenario and asked how they would handle it, where there is no correct answer and a good response depends on clear thinking rather than learned knowledge. Research suggests cognitive measures formulated as problem-solving business scenarios can account for 23-30% of the variance in executive performance measures.
The standard approach that is typically used when interviewing job candidates is the "Past Behavioral Interview" and can explain about 25% of the person's performance as an exec. This is where the interviewee is asked about their past experiences (such as "describe a time when you had a difficult employee and what you did to resolve the issue").
The authors state the Past Behavioral Interview prediction of performance is independent of the prediction from cognitive measures, meaning that the combination of the two techniques could predict the candidate's performance with 55-60% accuracy. How valid this statement of independence is not clear from the article, however; it may be based on the authors' assumptions on independence of qualities being measured by the two tests. Sixty percent predictive factor is an extremely high number for a two-hour test to predict human behavior and ability, which is why I question the ability to simply sum the predictive power of the two tests.
The standard approach that is typically used when interviewing job candidates is the "Past Behavioral Interview" and can explain about 25% of the person's performance as an exec. This is where the interviewee is asked about their past experiences (such as "describe a time when you had a difficult employee and what you did to resolve the issue").
The authors state the Past Behavioral Interview prediction of performance is independent of the prediction from cognitive measures, meaning that the combination of the two techniques could predict the candidate's performance with 55-60% accuracy. How valid this statement of independence is not clear from the article, however; it may be based on the authors' assumptions on independence of qualities being measured by the two tests. Sixty percent predictive factor is an extremely high number for a two-hour test to predict human behavior and ability, which is why I question the ability to simply sum the predictive power of the two tests.
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