This meta-analytic review presents the findings of a project investigating the validity of the employment interview. Analyses are based on 245 coefficients derived from 86,311 individuals. Results show that interview validity depends on the content of the interview (situational, job related, or psychological), how the interview is conducted (structured vs. unstructured; board vs. individual), and the nature of the criterion (job performance, training performance, and tenure; research or administrative ratings). Situational interviews had higher validity than did job-related interviews, which, in turn, had higher validity than did psychologically based interviews. Structured interviews were found to have higher validity than unstructured interviews. Interviews showed similar validity for job performance and training performance criteria, but validity for the tenure criteria was lower.

Publication bias poses multiple threats to the accuracy of meta-analytically derived effect sizes and related statistics. Unfortunately, a review of the literature indicates that unlike meta-analytic reviews in medicine, research in the organizational sciences tends to pay little attention to this issue. In this article, the authors introduce advances in meta-analytic techniques from the medical and related sciences for a comprehensive assessment and evaluation of publication bias. The authors illustrate their use on a data set on employment interview validities. Using multiple methods, including contour-enhanced funnel plots, trim and fill, Egger’s test of the intercept, Begg and Mazumdar’s rank correlation, meta-regression, cumulative meta-analysis, and selection models, the authors find limited evidence of publication bias in the studied data.

Situational judgment tests (SJTs) are personnel selection instruments that present job applicants with work-related situations and possible responses to the situations. There are typically 2 types of instructions: behavioral tendency and knowledge. Behavioral tendency instructions ask respondents to identify how they would likely behave in a given situation. Knowledge instructions ask respondents to evaluate the effectiveness of possible responses to a given situation. Results showed that response instructions influenced the constructs measured by the tests. Tests with knowledge instructions had higher correlations with cognitive ability. Tests with behavioral tendency instructions showed higher correlations with personality constructs. Results also showed that response instructions had little moderating effect on criterion-related validity. Supplemental analyses showed that the moderating effect of response instructions on construct validity was not due to systematic differences in item content. SJTs have incremental validity over cognitive ability, the Big 5, and over a composite of cognitive ability and the Big 5.

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