What is Living Validity?
Validity isn’t a one-time study. It’s a living property of an assessment that must evolve as your roles, workforce, and talent pools change.
For decades, assessment vendors have relied, and mostly still rely on static validation conducted onece years ago, separate from your context, your roles, and your candidates.
Living Validity is HiPeople’s dynamic approach to scientifically grounded, continually improving assessment validity.
It combines:
Custom pre-go-live validity studies based on your actual roles
Ongoing predictive validity monitoring inside the product
Adaptive models that recalibrate over time to maintain accuracy, fairness, and job-relatedness
This aligns with modern I/O science and solves the problems of validity decay and role drift in today’s organizations.
Why Static Validity Is Outdated
Traditional assessment vendors rely on:
Old validation studies
Non-representative samples
Job families that don’t match your roles
Outdated performance criteria
Assumptions that no longer hold in modern work
I/O research is clear:
Validity degrades over time when job demands or applicant pools shift (Sackett & Lievens, 2008).
Local, job-specific validation offers stronger evidence than “transported” validation (Morgeson et al., 2007).
Predictive models require ongoing recalibration to prevent drift and maintain accuracy (Aguinis et al., 2021).
Static tests can’t respond to these changes. HiPeople’s Living Validity is built to adapt.
Backed By Research
Sackett, P. R., & Lievens, F. (2008). Personnel Selection.
Schmidt, F. L., & Hunter, J. E. (1998). The Validity and Utility of Selection Methods.
Morgeson, F. P., et al. (2007). Reconsidering the Validity of Personality Tests.
Cascio, W. F., & Aguinis, H. (2008). Staffing Twenty-First-Century Organizations.
SIOP. (2018). Principles for the Validation and Use of Personnel Selection Procedures.