The Work Capacity Research Project

What Actually Predicts Job Performance?

A Multi-Company Study of the Six Unmeasurables

The Problem Every Employer Recognizes

You're hiring people who look perfect on paper—strong credentials, solid experience, impressive interviews—and they can't do the work.

Not because they lack technical skills. Not because they're unmotivated. But because they lack something no one is measuring: the psychological capacity to work independently.

Within 90 days, you're seeing the same pattern:

  • Constant need for reassurance and check-ins

  • Inability to sustain focus for more than an hour

  • Frustration when tasks aren't immediately clear

  • Repeated mistakes that require managerial intervention

  • High turnover or extended performance management

You've been told it's a "skills gap." Or that you need better onboarding. Or more competitive benefits.

What if the entire hiring industry is measuring the wrong things?

What We're Testing

For 39 years, I've observed that traditional hiring metrics—GPA, degree prestige, years of experience, interview performance—fail to predict who will succeed in the role.

The real predictors are six psychological capacities that don't appear on résumés:

The Six Unmeasurables

1. Interruption Resistance
Can they return to a task after being interrupted without restarting from scratch?

2. Sustained Effort Capacity
Can they work on something difficult for extended periods without needing breaks, validation, or task switches?

3. Frustration Tolerance
Can they encounter problems without externalizing blame or requiring immediate support?

4. Momentum Experience
Have they ever felt work pull them forward, or is all effort externally motivated?

5. Consequence Integration
Can they connect feedback to behavior change without repeated correction?

6. Self-Correction Capacity
Can they catch their own errors before someone else does?

This study will establish whether these capacities predict job performance better than credentials.

If they do, the entire hiring industry needs to change what it's measuring.

Study Design

What we're doing:
Tracking 500+ new hires across 20+ companies over 12 months, measuring both traditional hiring metrics and the Six Unmeasurables.

What we're proving:
Whether psychological capacity predicts retention, performance, and management overhead better than education, experience, and interview scores.

Why it matters:
If capacity matters more than credentials, you're optimizing your hiring process for the wrong variables—and losing money on every bad hire.

Who Should Participate

This study is for companies that:

✓ Are hiring at least 10 employees during the study period
✓ Employ roles requiring independent work and judgment
✓ Are frustrated with hiring outcomes despite strong candidate pipelines
✓ Want to develop their managers' ability to assess and develop talent
✓ Value data-driven answers, not consultant theories

Industries: Technology, healthcare, professional services, manufacturing, finance, and others
Company sizes: 50 to 5,000+ employees
Limited to 20 companies

What Participation Involves

Your commitment:

One-time setup (2-3 hours):

  • Manager training session on observing and scoring the Six Unmeasurables

  • Learn to identify capacity during normal onboarding activities

  • Practice with calibration exercises and scoring rubrics

Per new hire (40-60 minutes):

  • Observe new hires during existing onboarding tasks

  • Conduct one structured observation window (30-60 minutes) where hire works independently

  • Complete standardized scoring (10 minutes online form)

Monthly tracking (15 minutes per hire):

  • Brief performance update via online form

  • Note any changes in observable capacities

No external assessors. No disruption to your onboarding process. Your managers learn to see what matters.

Our commitment:

  • No cost to participate—Peak TCS absorbs all research expenses

  • Full confidentiality—your data is anonymized in publications

  • Comprehensive manager training and ongoing support

  • Quality control through calibration sessions and random audits

  • Minimal burden on your operations

Timeline: 18-month study (April 2025 - December 2026)

What You Receive

1. Manager Development

Your managers will learn to:

  • Diagnose capacity issues in Week 1, not Month 3

  • Distinguish between "needs training" and "lacks capacity"

  • Make better hiring and performance management decisions

  • Observe and evaluate psychological readiness for independent work

This alone is worth thousands in avoided training costs.

2. Custom Benchmark Report

  • How your hires compare to industry norms across all six capacities

  • Cost analysis of capacity-related performance failures

  • Identification of systematic gaps in your hiring pipeline

  • Validation of which traditional metrics (if any) actually predict performance for your roles

3. Validated Assessment Framework

  • Complete protocol for evaluating the Six Unmeasurables

  • Scoring rubrics your team is already trained to use

  • Integration guidance for your hiring process

  • Early-warning system for capacity deficits

4. Early Access to Findings

  • Quarterly research updates

  • Preview of publications before public release

  • Invitation to practitioner roundtables with other participants

  • Benchmarking data you can't get anywhere else

5. Ongoing Support

  • Calibration sessions to ensure scoring accuracy

  • Direct consultation access during study period

  • Troubleshooting for capacity-related challenges

  • Community of practice with other participating companies

6. Public Recognition (optional)

  • Acknowledgment in research publications

  • Case study inclusion (anonymized or attributed—your choice)

  • Co-author credit on peer-reviewed publications if applicable

The Potential Impact

Based on pilot data, companies that screen for the Six Unmeasurables reduce hiring failures by 75%.

If your average cost per failed hire is $40,000, and you hire 30 people per year with a 40% failure rate, that's $480,000 per year in preventable losses.

This study gives you the data to justify capacity-based hiring—and trains your managers to implement it.

Why This Approach Works

Most studies extract data and leave. This study builds capability.

Your managers aren't just providing data points—they're learning a diagnostic framework they'll use long after the study ends. They're developing the ability to:

  • Spot capacity deficits before they become performance problems

  • Understand why some hires succeed while others with similar credentials fail

  • Intervene earlier and more effectively when issues arise

  • Make more informed hiring recommendations

You're not just participating in research. You're upgrading your management team's assessment capabilities.

Why This Study Matters

Most hiring research focuses on what's easy to measure: résumés, test scores, interview performance. This study measures what actually matters: the capacity to do the work without constant intervention.

If we're right, the implications are significant:

  • The "talent shortage" is actually a capacity shortage

  • Traditional hiring metrics are largely non-predictive

  • Organizations are systematically selecting for the wrong attributes

  • The workforce crisis can't be solved with better pay or perks—it requires different selection criteria

This is the first large-scale empirical study of psychological work capacity. The findings will reshape how organizations think about hiring.

And your managers will be among the first trained to apply the framework.

Principal Investigator

Mike Frazier has 39 years of experience in workforce optimization and talent assessment. He owns Peak Talent Capital Solutions, where he has developed proprietary behavioral assessment systems that predict job performance independent of credentials. He has placed and tracked tens of thousands of hires across industries and built frameworks for evaluating psychological work capacity. He operates The MIND Foundation, focused on institutional competence and psychological maturity.

Participate in the Study

Limited to 20 companies. Enrollment closes March 31, 2025.

Interested in participating or learning more?

Schedule a consultation call:
[Calendar scheduling link]

Or contact directly:
Mike Frazier
Peak Talent Capital Solutions
mike@peaktcs.com
706-228-7325

Frequently Asked Questions

Won't manager-led assessment introduce bias and inconsistency?
We control for this through standardized training, clear behavioral scoring rubrics, calibration sessions, and random audits where Peak TCS independently assesses a sample of hires to validate manager accuracy. Multi-rater studies are standard in organizational psychology research.

What if our managers don't have time for training?
The training is 2-3 hours once, then 40-60 minutes per hire (most of which is observation during tasks already happening). Compare that to the cost of one failed hire: $40,000+ and weeks of management time trying to salvage the situation. This is preventive investment.

Will our company name be used in publications?
No, unless you specifically opt in. Full anonymization is the default.

Can we use this framework for hiring decisions during the study?
Yes, though we ask that you don't change your hiring process mid-study to preserve data integrity. After the study, you're free to fully implement capacity-based hiring.

What if a hire leaves before 12 months?
That's part of the data we're tracking. Early departures are outcomes we're measuring, not study failures. In fact, if capacity scores predict early departures, that's a key finding.

What's the risk to our company?
Minimal. The only "risk" is discovering that your current hiring process isn't predictive—information you need anyway. And your managers gain assessment skills regardless of what the data shows.

Will this disrupt our onboarding?
No. Managers observe during existing activities and add one structured observation window. Total incremental time is under an hour per hire.

Can we withdraw if needed?
Yes, with 30-day notice. There's no penalty for withdrawal.

How do you ensure our managers are scoring accurately?
Through four mechanisms: (1) Standardized training with calibration exercises, (2) Clear behavioral anchors in scoring rubrics, (3) Random audits by Peak TCS, (4) Quarterly calibration sessions to address scoring drift.

Media Inquiries

For press inquiries about the study:
mike@peaktcs.com

"The training alone was worth it. Our managers can now spot capacity issues in the first week instead of discovering them three months in. We're catching problems before they become expensive failures." — Director of Operations, Mid-Sized Manufacturing Company (Pilot Study Participant)