Lievens earned his PhD in industrial/organizational psychology at Ghent University in 1999 [1]. He built his career there before moving to Singapore Management University in January 2018 as Lee Kong Chian Professor of Human Resources in the Lee Kong Chian School of Business [2] — a chair named for Lee Kong Chian, the Singaporean philanthropist whose foundation endowed the school [3]. He remains a Visiting Professor at Ghent University’s Department of Personnel Management and Work and Organizational Psychology and an Honorary Professor at the University of Cape Town [4], a standing confirmed on Ghent’s own department page as of 2026 [5]. Beyond the academic posts, he sits on the WPG Science Faculty at Work Psychology Group, a UK occupational-psychology consultancy [1] — an applied tie alongside the research record.
His honors run the length of the field’s own institutions, several of them firsts. He was the first European winner of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology’s Distinguished Early Career Award (2006), given for distinguished contributions within seven years of the PhD [6]. He was the first industrial and organizational psychologist named a Laureate of the Royal Flemish Academy of Sciences and Arts (2008) and the first to receive the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation’s Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award (2013) [6]. He holds fellow status in SIOP (2013), the Association for Psychological Science (2017), the International Association of Applied Psychology (2018), and the American Psychological Association (2018) [6].
At SMU he has made the Dean’s Teaching Honour List six years running, AY2018–2019 through AY2023–2024, and won the school’s Best Instructor Award for its Master of Human Capital Leadership programme in AY2022–2023 [6] — teaching recognition alongside the research record.
His research centers on talent acquisition and assessment, with situational judgment, adaptability, and employer branding as the specific threads [4], and he sits on the editorial boards of the Journal of Applied Psychology and Personnel Psychology, plus four further journals in the field [7].
The work Management Craft cites is one entry in a partnership with Paul R. Sackett that runs longer than the 2022 headline paper. The two co-authored a 2017 review of a century of individual-differences research in the Journal of Applied Psychology [2], five years before their meta-analytic reassessment. The University of Minnesota’s own account of that reassessment — Revisiting Meta-Analytic Estimates of Validity in Personnel Selection, with Charlene Zhang and Christopher M. Berry — describes Lievens as Sackett’s “frequent collaborator,” and records that the paper won both the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology’s William A. Owens Scholarly Achievement Award for the year’s best I-O psychology publication and the Academy of Management HR Division’s Scholarly Achievement Award for the year’s most significant HR-management article [8].
SIOP’s own member newsletter reported the paper’s central finding — that structured interviews, not cognitive ability, are the strongest predictor of job performance — and quoted Sackett calling it “the most important paper of my career” [9]. The paper also went through SIOP’s own focal-article process: a focal piece in Industrial and Organizational Psychology: Perspectives, and a reply from all four authors to the commentaries it drew [2]. The collaboration kept going afterward, with a follow-up meta-analytic paper revisiting general mental ability tests and the validity-diversity trade-off [2].
Lievens sits at the devoted end of the spectrum: the PhD, the chair, the fellowships, and the editorial boards above all sit inside industrial/organizational psychology’s own institutions, not a management theorist visiting from outside. His word carries the most weight on personnel-selection methodology — situational judgment tests, assessment-center design, and the meta-analytic corrections behind validity estimates that bear on Recruiting & hiring — the terrain his awards, editorships, and this paper all sit on. It carries less independent weight on the broader practice of hiring or leadership — sourcing, interviewing craft, organizational design — where, like Sackett, he is a methodologist correcting the numbers other practitioners rely on rather than a practitioner setting hiring policy himself [8].