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Recent research has suggested that scores on measures of cognitive ability, measures of Conscientiousness, and interview scores are positively correlated with job performance. There remains, however, a question of incremental validity: To what extent do interviews predict above and beyond cognitive ability and Conscientiousness? This question was addressed in this paper by (a) conducting meta-analyses of the relationships among cognitive ability, Conscientiousness, and interviews, (b) combining these results with predictive validity results from previous meta-analyses to form a "meta-correlation matrix" representing the relationships among cognitive ability, Conscientiousness, interviews, and job performance, and (c) performing 9 hierarchical regressions to examine the incremental validity of 3 levels of structured interviews in best, actual, and worst case scenarios for prediction. Results suggested that interview scores contribute to the prediction of job performance over and above cognitive ability and Conscientiousness to the extent that they are structured, with scores from highly structured interviews contributing substantially to prediction. Directions for future research are discussed.
Research in the last 15 years has shown that cognitive ability, Conscientiousness, and interviews all contribute to prediction of job performance for a variety of jobs (e.g., Barrick & Mount, 1991; Huffcutt & Arthur, 1994; Hunter & Hunter, 1984). One question that arises from these findings is: To what extent do these predictors contribute to prediction over and above one another (Landy, Shankster, & Kohler, 1994)?
Early research on interviews suggested that they lacked predictive validity (for a review, see Arvey & Campion, 1982). More recent research has indicated that interviews can have higher average validities than researchers originally believed (e.g., Huffcutt & Arthur, 1994; McDaniel, Whetzel, Schmidt, & Maurer, 1994; Wright, Lichtenfels, & Pursell, 1989). As a result, researchers have called for an assessment of the incremental validity of interviews (Arvey & Campion, 1982; Thumin & Barclay, 1980). Specifically, the usefulness of interviews is best assessed in the context of other commonly used selection devices (Tett, Jackson, Rothstein, & Reddon, 1994; Schmidt & Hunter, 1998). With this in mind, the purpose of the present study was to address the issue of incremental validity by combining the results of new and previously published meta-analyses in order to examine the contribution of interview scores to the prediction of job performance over and above cognitive ability and...