The selection process is concerned with identifying the best candidate or candidates for jobs from the pool of qualified applicants developed during the recruitment process. This section discusses important considerations that are critical to successful selection and placement and includes basic selection criteria, choosing selection techniques, reliability and validity of selection techniques, making the final selection decision, and evaluating the selection and placement activities.
Basic Selection Criteria
At the heart of any effective selection system is an understanding of what characteristics are essential for high performance. This is where the critical role of job analysis in selection becomes most obvious because that list of characteristics should have been identified during the process of job analysis and should now be accurately reflected in the job specification. This information helps an organization go about selecting a given individual from a pool of qualified applicants. Thus, from a performance perspective, the goal of an organization’s selection system is to accurately determine which job
applicants possess the KSAs dictated by the job—for example, education and experience, specific skills and abilities, and personal characteristics—needed to perform a specific or current (or future) job
successfully. Additionally, an organization’s selection system must be capable of distinguishing between characteristics that are needed at the time of hiring, those that are systematically acquired during
training, and those that are routinely developed after an individual has been placed on the job.
Formal education, experience, and past performance. An organization selecting from a pool of qualified candidates wants to find the individual who has the right abilities and attitudes to be successful. A large number of cognitive, motor, physical, and interpersonal attributes are present because of what a person has learned at home, at school, on the job, and so on. One of the more common ways to screen for many of these abilities is by using educational accomplishment as a surrogate for or summary of the measures of those abilities. In a selection context formal education refers to the classroom training an individual has received in public or private schools and college, university, and/or technical school.
For some jobs, the organization may stipulate that people have a high school diploma. Other jobs require a two-year associate degree from a junior or community college, and still other jobs might require a four- year college education. In some instances the organization might leave the educational fields open, whereas in other cases they must be within a specified area such as accounting, mechanical engineering, French, or HRM. Occasionally, jobs may require advanced degrees such as a master’s degree or perhaps a doctorate in a specific field of study. In other cases a technical certification may also be a good
indicator of education. For example, many technical and vocational schools offer certificates when they train people for craft work such as plumbing, mechanical work, electrical work, and so on. The
organization might also prefer that the degree be from certain institutions, that the grade point average be higher than some minimum, and that certain honors have been achieved. What is important for organizations to remember is that to be legal, educational or other standards must be related to successful job performance. Care must be exercised not to set standards that are higher than actually required by the job.
While education is likely to continue to play an important role in the selection process, there is increased concern that general education level—such as specifying that an individual needs a high school diploma or two years of college—might be a bit too removed from what many employers today actually need from an individual on the job. Instead, an alternative model to focusing on education per se is to assess
“competencies.” Although the definitions of competencies vary from organization to organization, they basically refer to relatively broad capabilities that are necessary for effective job performance.
Experience and past performance is another useful criterion for selecting
employees. Selection specialists believe that past performance on a similar job is often one of the best indicators of future performance. Experience refers to the amount of time the individual has spent working, either in a general capacity or in a particular field of study. Experience is presumably an indicator of an individual’s familiarity with work, his or her ability to work, and a surrogate measure of a person’s competencies as an employee. In some cases it may be necessary that the individual have a predetermined level of experience in a certain field of study. For example, an organization looking for a director of marketing is quite likely to expect applicants to have experience in the marketing field. In other cases, however, the experience requirement may be more general. Simply having a certain number of years of experience in full-time work activities might be sufficient evidence of an individual’s
employability. And some entry-level jobs may require no experience at all.
A large number of research studies support the assumption that experience is related to job performance (Quinones, Ford, and Teachout, 1995). But the organization must have a rational basis for defining what it means by “relevant experience.” Not all previous experiences are equally good perdictors of
performance on a given job. For example, should two applicants applying for a job as an accountant be given the same credit for previous work experience if both have six years experience in the accounting profession but one has been an internal auditor for another organization and the other an accounting consultant for the General Accounting Office (GAO)?
Skills and abilities. Skills and abilities are another set of selection criteria. Skills and abilities relate more precisely than do experience or education to the specific qualifications and capabilities of an individual to perform a specific job (Dunn, Mount, Barrick, and Ones, 1995). For example, even though an
individual may have a college degree and a wealth of work experience, he or she may not have good skills and abilities regarding spatial relations (the ability to mentally manipulate three-dimensional objects in space). To the extent that the organization needs someone who has high levels of spatial relations (which would be the case for many assembly-line jobs), an applicant who lacks that skill will not be an attractive candidate for the organization.
As organizations move more toward teamwork and team-based operating systems, many of them are also putting more emphasis on hiring individuals with the skills necessary to function effectively in a group situation. Some organizations are using existing team members to help hire new members. The rationale for this practice is that current team members are well placed to assess a given individual’s ability to fit in and become an effective member of the team.
Personal characteristics. The final criterion category is personal characteristics. In some organizations it is also important to assess the personal
characteristics of individual job applicants. These personal characteristics are usually thought to reflect the individual’s personality and may be an important factor in certain kinds of jobs. Personal
characteristics include marital status, sex, age, and so on. Some organizations have, for example,
preferred “stable” married employees over single people because they have assumed that married people have a lower turnover rate. On the other hand, other employers might seek out single people for some jobs, since a single person might be more likely to accept a transfer or a lengthy overseas assignment.
Of course, when basing a selection decision on something such as personal characteristics, the organization must be able to clearly document a performance-related basis for the decision. For
example, if a department store manager cannot demonstrate empirically that an outgoing individual will be a more productive salesperson than a shy and introverted individual will be, then that qualification may be of questionable legality. Indeed, as will be discussed later, personal characteristics are among the most complex and sensitive selection criteria to assess and to validate.
Hiring for fit versus skill is an interesting controversy in selection today. Traditionally, HRM personnel believed that they should hire the person with the best set of job-specific skills relative to the work that needed to be performed. But others today are arguing that better candidates are those who best fit into the organization itself. HRM personnel believe that selection decisions should therefore be based on other factors such as personal characteristics, values, and so forth (Behling, 1998).
As with other personal characteristics, selection using any aspect of personality should always be based on whether it is really necessary for high performance. Many personality measures run an even greater risk of being legally challenged as an invasion of privacy than other kinds of selection tools. Thus, the organization wishing to use personality as a criterion must be certain that successful and unsuccessful employees can be distinguished in terms of their personalities. It is probably unwise to use personality as a general criterion for screening out “undesirable’’ applicants, since the same personality characteristic that leads to failure in one job might lead to success in another (Bourbeau, 1996). In part because of this fact, there is still considerable debate whether general, broad personality measures or more specific ones are the best to use in selection (Paunonen, Rothstein, and Jackson, 1999).
In the end, organizations need to have a clear understanding of the basic selection criteria relevant for their organizations. Such criteria typically include factors such as formal education and past experience, skills and abilities, and personal characteristics, although fit with the overall organization may be even more important.
Reliability and Validity of Selection Criteria
It is necessary to understand that there are a variety of techniques an organization can use in making selection decisions. However, before discussing some of these popular techniques, we will highlight the importance of ensuring that the selection techniques used are valid and reliable. Without such evidence the organization is holding itself open to the possibility of discrimination. As noted in Chapter 3, when there is evidence of disparate impact, the organization must prove that it is not discriminating.
Organizations can do so by demonstrating that the selection technique is job related. In practice, however, they must prove that the selection technique is a valid predictor of performance on the job.
That is, the information gathered about an applicant should be focused on finding predictors of the likelihood that the applicant will be able to perform the job well. Predictors can take many forms, but they should be job related, reliable, and valid. Previous experience can be a predictor of success if it is related to the necessary performance on the current job. Any selection tool used (for example,
application form, test, interview, education requirements, or years of experience required) should be used only if it is a valid predictor of job performance. Using invalid predictors can result in selecting the
“wrong” candidate and rejecting the “right” one.
Regardless of the method or technique chosen for collecting information about applicants, the
organization must be certain that the information is reliable and valid. We begin our discussion with reliability because a test that is not reliable can never be valid.
Reliability. The main goal of selection is to make accurate predictions about people. The organization wants to make its best guess about who will be a successful employee. In this way, the organization can avoid hiring the wrong person for a job. In other words, the main purpose of selection is to make
decisions about people. If these decisions are going to be correct, the techniques used for making them must yield reliable information.
Reliability refers to the consistency of a particular selection device. That is, the reliability of a predictor is the extent to which it repeatedly produces the same results. Specifically, reliability means that the selection device measures whatever it is supposed to measure, without random error. For example, if the same person took a test in December and scored 100, but upon taking it in March scored significantly lower, the test would not be highly reliable. Thus, as noted above, reliability has to do with consistency, and predictors that are useful in selection should be consistent.
Reliability can be assessed in a variety of ways. One common method of assessing the reliability of a selection technique is called test-retest reliability. In this case the same individual or individuals are subjected to the selection technique at two points in time. If there is a high positive corre-
lation between their scores or evaluation between the two time points, then reliability can be inferred.
That is, test results seem to be consistent over time and thus may be taken as being reliable. Any random error component would change over time, resulting in inconsistencies, so the degree of consistency is an indication of how much of the score is due to what is being measured, rather than to error. Another
method of establishing reliability, particularly for employment tests, is called alternative-form reliability.
Alternative-form reliability is determined by correlating scores from two alternate forms of the same test. Most standard academic achievement tests like the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) and the
Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT) have numerous forms, all of which are assumed to be reliable. An applicant’s score should not vary much according to which form of the test he or she happens to take. When a measuring tool relies on the judgments of people (such as in an employment interview), reliability is often determined by using interrater reliability. This refers to the extent to which two or more interviewers’ assessments are consistent with each other. Each rater is treated like a test, and the scores of the raters are correlated to check for consistency. Differences between the raters are considered error. For example, in a group interview situation, all the interviewers were present for the same interview and therefore should agree on their ratings of the applicant’s experience and
qualifications. Interrater reliability is also important in assessment centers, where multiple raters assess a candidate’s capabilities in several different situations. Assessment centers will be discussed later in this chapter.
Validity. For a selection tool to be useful, it is not sufficient for it to be repeatable or stable. Both legally and organizationally, the measures that it yields must also be valid. Validity refers to the extent to which a measure or indicator is, in fact, a real reflection of what is assumed to be. Validity occurs to the extent that a predictor actually predicts what it is supposed to predict. Validity depends on the situation in which the selection device is being used (Murphy and Sharella, 1997). For example, a test designed to predict aptitude for child care jobs might not be valid in predicting sales potential in a candidate for a sales representative position.
The first condition for a measure to be valid is that it be reliable, as described above. If a test is
measuring pure error, it cannot be measuring what is relevant to the selection process. There are three general methods of determining validity, but they tend to overlap, and in a particular situation they may all be appropriate.
Criterion-related validity refers to the correlation between scores on the selection device and ratings on a particular criterion of job performance. For example, if a ballet company wanted to decide whether gregarious people are better fundraisers, it could ask all its current fundraisers to take a personality test.
Then it could correlate the fundraisers’ scores on gregariousness with their performance as fundraisers.
If gregariousness and
fundraising performance were correlated, criterion-related validity would be established. Criterion- related validity replaces judgments about which predictors are most useful with statistical analyses that demonstrate the predictive usefulness of criteria. Because the validity of job criteria themselves can be called into question, however, validation studies must be designed carefully (Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, 1987).
It is also important to note that even if establishing criterion-related validity were not important in civil rights cases, organizations would still need to be sure of the relationship between scores on their
selection devices and performance on the job. If this relationship is missing, the selection device will not help to select better performers. In other words, if organizations select individuals merely on the basis of chance (for example, the flip of a coin) they will produce a workforce that is as effective as that selected using the test. Since it costs time and money to administer any selection device, the organization would be throwing away money on a selection system that produced no benefits in terms of performance.
Content validity is another type of validity. Content validity is the extent to which a selection technique such as a test or interview actually measures the knowledge, skills, and abilities that are necessary to perform the job. For a secretarial position, a typing test would have a high content validity if the
secretary had to produce many letters a day. But for a job as administrative assistant involving minimal typing, the same test would have little content validity. This is the simplest kind of validity to determine, but it cannot apply to tests that measure learning ability or general problem solving.
The third kind of validity is called construct validity. Construct validity is the extent to which a relationship exists between scores on the measure and the underlying trait the measure is supposed to tap. For example, if an organization wanted to measure the “conscientiousness’’ of applicants but was not happy with existing measures, it might set about to develop its own measure of this personality test.
The question would be whether the measure that was developed really assessed conscientiousness, which is the fundamental issue in construct validity. Because traits cannot be directly observed,
construct validity cannot be established in a single study but can be assumed to exist only on the basis of a large body of empirical work yielding consistent results (Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, 1987).
The Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures have established three stringent requirements for demonstrating the construct validity of a selection technique (Abram, 1979).
1. A job analysis must systematically define both the work behaviors involved in the job and the constructs that are believed to be important to job performance.
2. The test must measure one of those constructs. In selecting a project manager, for instance, there must be evidence that the test validly measures leadership. For example, scores on the test might correlate with leadership ratings given to other employees in other organizations upon previous administration of the test.
3. The construct must be related to performance of critical work behaviors. For example, it must be shown that leadership ability is correlated with job performance for the position of project
manager. That is, it is necessary to conduct a criterion validity study between leadership and
performance, or to use such data collected by another test to support the claim of construct validity.
Single versus combined predictors. If an organization chooses to use only one predictor (for example, a test) to select who will be hired, the decision is straightforward. If the test is valid and encompasses a major dimension of a job and the applicant does well on the test, she or he can be hired. This is the single predictor approach. Selection accuracy depends on how valid that single predictor is at predicting performance.
In reality, no selection technique is perfectly reliable and valid. Hence most organizations rely on a number of selection techniques and, in fact, may use all or most of the selection techniques available.
Hence a person who applies for a job may be (1) subjected to a preliminary screening interview to make sure that he or she meets the minimum qualifications, (2) asked to complete an application and agree to background checks, and (3) required to undergo employment tests and/or participate in work
simulations. For example, a large number of the best companies to work for in America rely heavily on multiple predictors when making hiring decisions (Martin, 1998).
An individual who is found to be qualified for employment, based on his or her performance on these various selection techniques, may be subjected to more in-depth interviews, followed by reference and recommendation checks. Finally, physical examinations might be authorized for those who are about to be offered employment. By combining or using multiple predictors in this way, the organization is presumably able to counterbalance the measurement error in one selection technique against another.
For example, if a particular candidate for the job scores well on all selection techniques except one, the organization may choose either to ignore the results of that one technique or to try to learn more about why the individual did not perform better. Thus the basic reasoning behind combining predictors is to enhance the validity and reliability of the overall selection process by taking advantage of a wider variety of information. However, it should be noted that having too many predictors—especially those with lower accuracy rates—may actually harm the quality of selection decisions (Mornell, 1998). It is important to ensure that only predictors that genuinely distinguish between successful and unsuccessful employees are used.