Employee selection

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Employee Selection

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The Basics of Testing and Selecting Employees

• With a pool of complicated applications, your next step is to select the best person for the job.

• This usually means whittling down the applicant pool by using the screening tools, including tests, background and reference checks, and interviews.

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Why Careful Selection Is Important

• First your own performance always depends in part on your subordinates.

• Second the time to screen out undesirable candidates is before they are in the door, not after.

• Finally effective screening is also important because it’s costly to recruit and hire employees.

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Legal Implications and Negligent Hiring

• Careful selection is also important because of the legal implications of incompetent selection.

• EEO legislation and court decisions require you to ensure that you’re not unfairly discriminating against any protected group.

• Furthermore, courts will find employers liable when employees with criminal records or other problems use their access to customers’ homes or similar opportunities to commit crimes.

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• Hiring workers with such backgrounds without proper safeguard is called negligent hiring.

• For example, after lawyers sued Wal-Mart alleging that several of its employees with criminal convictions for sexually related offenses had assaulted young girls, Wal-Mart instituted a new program of criminal background checks for qualified candidates.

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Validity

• Effective screening is therefore important, and depends, to a large degree, on the basic testing concepts of validity and reliability.

• Sometimes what you’re measuring is fairly obvious, but sometimes it’s not.

• A test is a sample of a person’s behavior, but some tests more clearly reflect the behavior being sampled.

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• Test validity answers the question, Does this test measure what it’s suppose to measure?

• Validity refers to the confidence one has in the meaning attached to the scores.

• With respect to the employee selection tests, the term validity often refers to evidence that the test is job related i.e. the performance on the test is a valid predictor of the subsequent performance on the job.

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• A selection test must be valid because, without proof of its validity, there is no logical or legally permissible reason to continue using it to screen job applicants.

• In employment testing, there are two ways to demonstrate a test’s validity: Criterion validity and Content validity.

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Reliability

• Reliability is the test’s other important characteristic and refers to its consistency.

• It is “the consistency of scores by the same person when retested with the identical tests or with the equivalent form of a test.”

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Ways to Estimate a Test’s Consistency

• Administer the same test to the same people at two different points in time, comparing their test scores at Time 2 with their scores at Time 1; this would be a retest estimate.

• Or you could administer a test and then administer what experts believe to be an equivalent test to a later date; this would be an equivalent-form estimate.

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• A test’s internal consistency is another measure of its reliability.

• This would provide a measure of internal reliability of the test and is referred to as an internal comparison estimate.

• Internal consistency is one reason you often find questions that apparently are repetitive on some test questionnaires.

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How to Validate a Test

• What makes a test such as GRE useful for college admission directors?

• The answer to the above question is usually that people’s scores on these tests have shown to be predictive of how people perform.

• Thus, other things equal, students who score high on GRE also do better in graduate school.

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• Strictly speaking, an employer should be fairly sure that scores on the tests are related in a predictable way to performance on the job before using that test on screening employees.

• It is important that you validate the test before using it.

• You generally do this by ensuring that tests scores are a good predictor of some criterion such as job performance.

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Ethical and Legal Questions in Testing

• Equal Employment Opportunity Aspects of Testing

• Individual Rights of Test Takers and Test Security

• Using Tests as Supplements

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Equal Employment Opportunity Aspects of Testing

• You must be able to prove that your tests were related to success or failure on the job.

• You must prove that your tests don’t unfairly discriminate against either minority or non-minority subgroups.

• If confronted by a legitimate discrimination charge, the burden of proof rests with you.

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Individual Rights of Test Takers and Test Security

• Test takers have various privacy and security rights.• Under the APA’s standard for educational and

Psychological tests, they have the right to confidentiality of the test results and the right to informed consent regarding the use of these results.

• They have the right to expect that only people qualified to interpret the scores will have access to them.

• They have right to expect that the test is secure.

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Using Tests as Supplements

• Don’t use tests as your only selection technique, instead, use them to supplement other techniques such as interviews and background checks.

• Tests are not infallible. Even in the best cases, the test score usually accounts for only about 25% of the variation in the measure of performance.

• In addition, tests are often better at telling you which candidates will fail than which will succeed.

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Using Tests at Work

• Employers use tests to measure a wide range of candidate attributes, including cognitive abilities, motor and physical abilities, personality and interests, and achievement.

• Employee testing is not just for large employers.

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Basic Types of Tests

• Tests for Cognitive Abilities• Tests for Motor and Physical Abilities• Personality and Interests Measuring Tests• Achievement Tests• Computerized Testing

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Management Assessment Centers

• The in-basket. In this exercise, the candidate is faced with an accumulation of reports, memos, notes of incoming phone calls, letters, and other materials collected in the in-basket of the simulated job he or she is to take over. The candidate takes appropriate action on each of these material.

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• The leaderless group discussion. A leaderless group is given a discussion question and told to arrive at a group decision. The raters then evaluate each group member’s interpersonal skills, acceptance by the group, leadership ability, and individual influence.

• Individual presentations. A participant’s communication skills and persuasiveness are evaluated by having the person to make an oral presentation on an assigned topic.

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Testing on the Web

• Firms are increasingly using the Web to test and screen applicants.

• Applicants for call center jobs complete an online application and online math and biodata tests. They also take an online role-playing call simulation.

• Applicants answer multiple-choice questions online regarding how they would respond.

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Interviewing Prospective Employees

• Although not all companies use tests or assessment centers, it is very unusal for a manager not to interview a prospective employee.

• Interviewing is thus an indispensible management tool.• An interview is a procedure designed to solicit

information form a person’s oral responses to oral inquiries.

• A selection interview is a selection procedure designed to predict future job performance on the basis of applicants’ oral responses to oral inquiries.

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Types of Selection Interviews

• Structured interviews: Also called directive interview, questions and perhaps even acceptable responses are specified in advance, and the responses may be rated for appropriateness of the content.

• Non-structured interviews: You ask questions as they come to mind, and there is generally no set format to follow.

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• Situational interviews: questions focus on the candidates ability to project what his or her behavior would be in a given situation.

• A behavioral interview: you ask interviewees how they behaved in the past in some situation.

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• One-on-one interviews: Two people meet alone and one interviews the other by seeking oral responses to oral inquiries.

• Sequential interviews: several people interview the applicant in sequence before a selection decision is made.

• Panel interviews: The candidate is interviewed simultaneously by a group (or panel) of interviewers, rather than sequentially.

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How Useful are Interviews?

• The statistical evidence regarding their validity is mixed.

• The key is that the interview’s usefulness depends on how you administer it.

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Some Generalizations

• With respect to predicting job performance, situational interviews a higher mean validity than do behavioral interviews.

• Structured interviews, regardless of content, are more valid than unstructured interviews for predicting job performance.

• Individual interviews tend to be more valid than are panel interviews.

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How to Avoid Common Interviewing Mistakes

• Snap judgments• Negative emphasis• Not knowing the job• Pressure to hire• Candidate order (contrast) error• Influence of nonverbal behavior• Applicant disability and the employment

interview

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Guidelines for Conducting an Interview

• Plan the interview• Structure the interview• Establish rapport• Ask questions• Close the interview• Review the interview