Hiring & Selection: Structured Candidate Intelligence That Interviews Can't Provide
The Problem with Standard Pre-Hire Assessment
The science of personnel selection is one of the most mature areas in applied psychology. Decades of meta-analytic research have established clear findings: general cognitive ability is the single strongest predictor of job performance across virtually all occupations, with validity coefficients consistently in the .50–.55 range for complex jobs. Conscientiousness is the most robust personality predictor. Structured interviews outperform unstructured interviews by a wide margin. Multi-method assessment produces more accurate predictions than any single instrument alone.
These findings are not controversial. And yet the vast majority of organizations do not implement them. Instead, most pre-hire assessment relies on brief self-report questionnaires that are transparent, fakeable, and vulnerable to impression management.
What We Measure and Why
Cognitive Capacity
A clinical-grade evaluation of processing speed, working memory, and executive function. Cognitive capacity assessment using standardized performance tasks cannot be faked — a candidate cannot choose to process information faster or hold more items in working memory than they actually can.
Personality Functioning — Three Measurement Channels
Self-report with embedded validity scales — Five-Factor Model with scales detecting inconsistent responding, social desirability bias, and careless responding.
Implicit association measurement — Reaction-time paradigms capturing automatic associations that operate below the threshold of conscious impression management. When someone's self-report says they are highly collaborative but their implicit associations reveal competitive-dominant patterns, that discrepancy is informative.
Cross-method validity integration — When self-report, implicit measurement, and cognitive data all point in the same direction, confidence is high. When they diverge, the divergence itself is diagnostic.
Output and Deliverables
Every candidate assessment produces: a standardized cognitive capacity profile benchmarked against role-specific norms; a personality functioning profile with validity indicators and confidence intervals; an implicit measurement summary; a cross-method integration narrative; and specific, behaviorally anchored predictions about job performance patterns.
Title VII Defensibility
Every component is linked to empirically established predictors of job performance, every scoring algorithm is transparent and documented, and every output includes the validity evidence supporting its interpretation. In the event of a challenge, the evidentiary foundation is already built into the system.