The election of a president of the United States isn’t just democracy in circuslike action. It also may be, at its core, the most elaborate and expensive recruitment and hiring process that mankind has ever created.

You can think of a presidential election as being like a particularly large company’s search for a chief executive. In this case, the search costs a couple of billion dollars (the amount that will be expended on campaigns), has a hiring committee of 127 million people (the number of voters last cycle), and is covered at every turn by virtually every media organization on earth.

What, then, can the latest evidence about best hiring practices tell us about the election, in which hiring the best employee has particularly high stakes? Good news: The answers might just make you feel a little better about American democracy.

In the last several years, there has been a lot of evidence, both from academic work and from companies that approach recruitment analytically, that traditional job interviews aren’t particularly good tools for identifying the best employees.