The Resident Application Process and Its Correlation to Future Performance as a Resident

In Brief Many authors have attempted to determine predictors for success within a residency program. There is very little agreement about what is useful. We hypothesized that our residency selection process is effective in determining which resident applicants would be most likely to excel in our program. To test this hypothesis, we reviewed the scores that applicants received after their interview day to determine if there was a correlation with any measures used to evaluate residents once they entered residency training. Our results determined that the score given to an applicant fails to correlate with any of the areas that are evaluated throughout their residency. The only statistically significant correlation was between the scores assigned by the selection committee to applicants and the applicant scores on their first year in training examination. We concluded that our residency selection process score does not accurately predict which applicants will excel in our program. IMPLICATIONS: Given the amount of time, money, and effort spent on resident recruitment, interviewing, and selection, we should be able to select the best applicants who apply to our programs. We compared how applicants were rated after the interview process to how they later performed within our residency.