On Base Rate of Success
One of my favorite terms in HR is "base rate of success." Its also rarely discussed, but absolutely critical.
Simply put, the "base rate of success" tells us the proportion of employees who would be successful on the job if we hired randomly instead of applying some predictor.
As Gatewood and Feild (2010) write in their book "Human Resource Selection:"
"If 100 percent of the applicants would be successful if hired, there is no added information provided by the predictor; one would simply randomly pick from the pool of superstar candidates. Conversely, if every applicant in the selection pool...