Frank Schmidt was interviewed by David Lubinski at the 2010 meeting in Alexandria, Virginia.

Frank Schmidt, who died in 2021, was a leading industrial-organizational psychologist. He earned his PhD at Purdue University and spent much of his career at the University of Iowa’s Tippie College of Business, where he held the Gary C. Fethke Chair in Leadership.

With his longtime collaborator John Hunter, Schmidt developed the methods of psychometric meta-analysis and validity generalization, which showed that the predictive power of employment tests holds up across organizations and settings once the distorting effects of small samples and measurement error are removed. Their widely cited 1998 review concluded that general mental ability is the single best predictor of job performance, a finding that reshaped how psychologists think about testing and personnel selection.

His contributions were recognized with the James McKeen Cattell Award for applied psychology and a Distinguished Scientific Contributions Award shared with Hunter, among many other honors.