Biographical data in employment selection: Can validities be made generalizable?

Abstract

The hypothesis was examined that organizational specificity of biodata validity results from the methods typically used to select and key items. In this study, items were initially screened for job relevance, keying was based on large samples from multiple organizations, and items were retained only if they showed validity across organizations. Cross-validation was performed on approximately 11,000 first-line supervisors in 79 organizations. The resulting validities were meta-analyzed across organizations, age levels, sex, and levels of education, supervisory experience, and company tenure. In all cases, validities were generalizable. Validities were also stable across time and did not appear to stem from measurement of knowledge, skills, or abilities acquired through job experience. Finally, these results provide additional evidence against the hypothesis of situational specificity of validities, the first large-sample evidence in a noncognitive domain. Substantial evidence now indicates that the two most valid predictors of job performance are cognitive ability tests and biodata instruments. The quantitative review of the literature by Hunter and Hunter (1984) has estimated the average validity of tests of general cognitive ability against supervisory ratings of overall job performance as .47, whereas the average (cross