Employers must commit before they can fully observe performance, so every unfamiliar candidate creates a real forecasting problem that weak signals and manager intuition only partly solve.

The United States makes tens of millions of hiring decisions each year, but no instrument perfectly predicts performance, learning, retention, or team fit. Structured tests and interviews can help, but they can also create bias, accessibility failures, or false precision. A record from The Solar Guild would begin as one more unfamiliar signal and must earn its usefulness through direct comparison.

Contents (6 sections)

Evidence snapshot

Supported by cited sources
FindingScope or qualification
U.S. employers recorded 65.3 million hires and 63.2 million separations in 2024.Events, not unique people; nevertheless an enormous recurring matching process.
Median employee tenure was 3.9 years in January 2024.Matching and rematching recur throughout careers.
22% of workers had been with their employer for one year or less.A large early-tenure population where matching quality matters.
Greater reliance on job tests increased average tenure in two large field settings.Promising but occupation- and implementation-specific.

What the evidence does not prove

Supported by cited sources

There is no credible universal bad-hire cost. Tests can create disparate impact or screen out people with disabilities; work trials can become unpaid productive labor. Employer acceptance of a new record is unknown.

Why different stakeholders can care

Proposed

Employers gain decision quality; applicants gain a fairer chance; coworkers gain better-prepared teammates; and public workforce programs gain a measurable bridge to employment.

Question to investigate

Open question

What The Solar Guild must test

Research question

Give employers the same decision with and without a work-result record from The Solar Guild, then compare comprehension, confidence, consistency, time, bias, and downstream accuracy.

Core sources

Supported by cited sources
BLS — Job Openings and Labor Turnover, 2024BLS — Employee TenureDiscretion in HiringEEOC/DOJ — Algorithmic tools and disability discrimination

References and limits

This page is published by The Solar Guild. Sources are listed so readers can inspect the basis of the page. A project statement is not independent proof unless the page identifies supporting outside evidence.

  • Problem 5 in The Solar Guild — Twenty Problems Worth Testing v1.0
  • Direct source links are provided above; quantitative claims retain their stated scope and qualification
  • The Solar Guild's response is explicitly separated from evidence that the problem exists