Briefs

March 8, 2006. With the assembly line, Henry Ford created a unified production process that revolutionized the manufacturing industry. Now, a University of Calgary business professor has designed a unified selection process that promises to revolutionize the world of human resources.

Its technical name is 'synthetic validity,' and it has been the Holy Grail of business academics for the past 50 years. Once the system is implemented it's expected to streamline hiring processes, save businesses many thousands of dollars, and contribute hundreds of billions of dollars annually to North American economies.

And what's more, it can be applied to online dating.

�Essentially this is a single standardized system that could select almost anybody for anything in one-thousandth the time and one-thousandth the cost,� says Dr. Piers Steel (right), a professor in the U of C�s Haskayne School of Business and lead author of a paper on synthetic validity in the March International Journal of Selection and Assessment.

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