Recruiters' New Secret Weapon: Psych Tests that Predict Job Performance

Can psych evaluations pick out long-term winners from losers in executive recruiting? Professors from Harvard and the University of Toronto -- who have spent years studying studied ways to evaluate intangible but crucial traits -- believe they've devised a method that doesn't just size up smarts and skills, but can accurately predict how well managers and execs will perform over the long haul.

It's all documented in a new report from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Trust me when I say this isn't beach reading: It's 22 pages of mostly migraine-inducing small print, unless you're a social sciences PhD. Authors Jordan Peterson (Univeristy of Toronto), Daniel Higgins (Harvard) and two others go into exhaustive but ultimately compelling detail about the potential of new evaluation tools such as the "Five-Dimensional Temperament Inventory." It's a computerized self-reported survey that measures a person's Emotional Stability, Extraversion, Openness, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness -- traits managed by the prefrontal cortex, the region of the brain that manages "executive" functions -- and then makes predictions about on long-term job performance based on results.

Basic intelligence and personality testing, of course, have been used successfully for decades; this study suggests that there are ways to take the process a step further, with an emphasis on actual performance. The authors even have some preliminary evidence that these new testing techniques go straight to the bottom line: Adopting these methods in the recruitment process, they say, would turn out managers and execs who are 33 percent more productive.