Patent ID: 7562059

Claim:
A method of constructing a model predicting employment performance based on a set of input employment parameters, the method comprising: receiving a set of input parameters indicating pre-hire psychological assessment and bio-data characteristics of an employee, wherein the pre-hire psychological assessment and bio-data characteristics are available before hiring the employee and are collected electronically from the employee as pre-hire answers to questions, wherein the questions comprise psychological assessment questions and bio-data questions; receiving a set of one or more output parameters indicating one or more post-hire outcomes observed after hiring the employee, wherein the one or more post-hire outcomes comprise one or more post-hire outcomes selected from the group consisting of number of accidents, sales level, units produced, attendance, number of disciplinary incidents, dollar sales per hour, promotions, salary increases, probationary survival, and completion of training programs; identifying respective of the input parameters as ineffective predictors of the one or more post-hire outcomes, wherein the identifying comprises evaluating whether a plurality of sets of permutations of the input parameters are effective in predicting the one or more post-hire outcomes, and wherein at least one of the sets of permutations comprises at least one of the psychological assessment questions and at least one of the bio-data questions, and wherein the identifying comprises determining whether a random relationship between a respective permutation and the one or more post-hire outcomes is exhibited; reducing the input parameters to a subset of input parameters for use as remaining input features to a neural network, wherein the reducing comprises removing the ineffective predictors, and wherein the remaining input features comprise a mix of answers to psychological assessment questions and answers to bio-data questions; and training a neural network with the one or more observed post-hire outcomes and the remaining input features, comprising a mix of answers to psychological assessment questions and answers to bio-data questions, to predict the one or more post-hire outcomes for a job applicant for use in a hiring recommendation based at least on pre-hire answers by the job applicant to questions corresponding to the remaining input features, wherein the neural network is stored in a computer-readable medium.