John E. Hunter earned his Ph.D. in psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and spent nearly all of his career as a professor in the Department of Psychology at Michigan State University [1]. The paper Management Craft cites him for confirms that placement directly: its own author line reads, in full, “Frank L. Schmidt, Department of Management and Organization, University of Iowa; John E. Hunter, Department of Psychology, Michigan State University” [2]. That 1998 paper set out to summarize the practical and theoretical implications of 85 years of research in personnel selection [2]: it is The Validity and Utility of Selection Methods in Personnel Psychology, and it is the record behind Recruiting & hiring’s ranking of assessment methods.
Hunter’s distinguishing contribution is a method, not a single finding: with Schmidt, he co-developed psychometric meta-analysis, correcting a study’s validity estimate for measurement error and range restriction before pooling it with others. SIOP’s Schmidt-Hunter Meta-Analysis Award credits the pair with revolutionizing research by identifying the statistical artifacts that had been distorting validity studies [3]. Hunter received the APA’s Distinguished Scientific Award for Contributions to Applied Psychology jointly with Schmidt, and the Distinguished Scientific Contributions Award from the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, also jointly with Schmidt; he was a Fellow of the American Psychological Association [1]. The International Communication Association’s Information Systems Division separately named the John E. Hunter Memorial Award, for the best meta-analysis by a member, in his honor: Hunter had mentored many of its graduate-student members at Michigan State and pointed them toward communication as a direction for social science [4].
One position on the public record belongs here, because it sits on the same ground as the work Management Craft cites. In December 1994 Hunter was one of 52 signatories to “Mainstream Science on Intelligence,” a statement on intelligence research published in the Wall Street Journal. It had been sent to 131 researchers: 52 signed, 48 returned it with an explicit refusal, and 31 did not reply [6]. The 1998 meta-analysis turns on general mental ability as a predictor of job performance, so a reader weighing that finding should know its author was a public participant in the argument about intelligence testing rather than a bystander to it. Management Craft does not adjudicate that argument.
Hunter sits at the devoted end of the spectrum: a career built entirely around methodology for one practical management problem, who to hire, not a lens borrowed once from an adjacent field. His word carries real weight on two things: the meta-analytic method itself, and the 1998 ranking of personnel-selection procedures it produced. It carries much less weight on that ranking’s exact numbers today. Sackett, Zhang, Berry, and Lievens’ 2022 reanalysis took Schmidt and Hunter’s 1998 summary as its own starting point and found the range-restriction correction at its center had been applied too broadly, a finding that demotes cognitive-ability tests below structured interviews in the revised ranking [5]. Read Hunter for the method and for how the field organized selection validity for three decades; read Sackett et al. for the number Management Craft uses today.