For the last 10 years, I’ve been on a crusade; A campaign to shed light on the relative effectiveness of common selection practices. While I’ve been out there pontificating about the power of assessing for cognitive ability and key personality traits, companies have continued to plod along… Reviewing resumes (78% of which contain falsehoods), conducting interviews (fraught with bias), and screening for education and experience (which have somewhere between a zero and a miniscule ability to predict anything work-related).
But, alas, a mindset shift is finally upon us! Largely accelerated due to Covid-related issues, organizations are (finally) experiencing epiphanies about what matters most. Check out the World Economic Forum’s findings on the Top 10 Skills of 2025.
- The ability to learn, problem-solve, and think critically are the most important skills one can have in this VUCA world we live in. Why?
- The half-life of learned skills is 5 years. Re-skilling is going to be constant and unavoidable, so you better be able to learn new stuff.
- Since the rate of change isn’t going to slow down any time soon, this will continue to be important.
- 100 years’ worth of workplace productivity studies have shown that Cognitive Ability is the single best predictor of job performance. Period. We’ve known this for a long time, but it’s now time to embrace it.
- The most important personality traits moving forward are Creativity/Innovation, Adaptability/Flexibility, and Resilience. Also showing up on “most needed lists” are things like Intellectual Curiosity, Leadership, and Empathy.
- These are meas-ur-a-ble. There are tools out there specifically designed to tell you how much of each trait a candidate possesses compared to the broader population.
- The above bullet describes normative assessments, as opposed to the widely-used and largely-useless (for selection purposes) 4-quadrant ipsative assessments.
- There is also value in measuring motivation, values, and interests in combination with personality, as some things—take “innovation” as an example—are a function not just of ability, but also of desire/drive.
2021 is my year! After two decades of working with organizations to create more predictive selection systems, it seems organizations are hungry, if not desperate, to hire based on things that actually correlate with job performance rather than clinging to the-way-we’ve-always-done-it methods that, in our current reality, are often doing more harm than good.
PS. If you are going to attend the national SHRM or SHRM Talent Management conference, I hope you’ll attend my sessions on hiring assessments. Can’t wait to be back in my pulpit IN PERSON!
