I heard a presentation the other day by Dan Putka of HumRRO about the role vocational interest in job selection. To this point, the received wisdom has been that vocational interest has little value in predicting job performance after the Big Five personality factors and cognitive ability are taken into account. While counter-intuitive, this finding has been replicated repeatedly in the literature and has become quite well-accepted.   Putka and his colleagues hypothesized that part of this may be due to the fact that most measures of vocational preference were developed to measure occupational interest (e.g., what are the jobs that match my interests) and not designed for selection (e.g., what jobs do I want to do). For example, while some may enjoy fixing things around the house, they may not necessarily be interested in an occupation that involves this.

Based upon this assumption, they created a job interest inventory for selection that targets the sort of work an individual would be interested in having. Using in a very large scale study with the military, they found that job interest was more predictive of both intent to stay in a position and job knowledge than were either personality factors or cognitive ability. They hypothesize that while initial performance may be better predicted by other factors, whether an individual will have a long-term emotional investment in a job (as evidenced by the desire to stay in the job and learn more about it over time) are better predicted by interest. The article is currently in press at the Journal of Applied Psychology.

Reid Klion