Assessment Methods for Selection & Testing

What are the different characteristics of people that are needed for a job?

KSAO’s

• Knowledge

• Skills

• Ability

• Other personal characteristics

How are KSAO’s determined for each job?

A job analysis:

• Tasks performed

• Conditions under which they are performed.

• KSAO’s needed to perform the tasks

• When KSAO’s are needed

  • Before and After hire.

What are Cognitive Abilities?

2OWNOMRG

• Oral & written comprehension.

• Oral & written expression.

• Numerical facility.

• Originality

• Memorization.

• Reasoning

• General Learning

What letter refers to general mental ability

g

What are some strengths of measuring cognitive abilities?

• Highest validity of all selection measures.

• Easy to administer.

• Relatively inexpensive.

What are some weaknesses of measuring cognitive abilities?

• Likely to cause adverse impact.

• Diffficulty of setting passing score.

What are the 2 most common Cognitive Ability Test?

1. Wonderlic Personnel Test

2. Siena Reasoning Test

What are the steps for Situational Judgment Test?

1. Set up weekly meetings with your team to review progress and set short-term objectives.

2. Inform the team that there is too much careless work and announce the introduction of a formal record of errors. Stress the fact that individuals making repeated errors will be dealt with.

3. Establish formal target setting and review arrangements for each member of the team.

What does a Psychomotor ability test measure?

• Coordination

• Dexterity

• Reaction Time

What does a Physical Ability Test measure?

• Muscular strength.

• Cardiovascular endurance.

• Movement quality.

What does a Perceptual Ability Test measure?

• Vision, colour discrimination, depth perception, glare sensitivity, speech and hearing.

What is a Personality Test?

• Personality is a collection of traits that persists across time and situation and differentiate one person from another.

• Personality inventories predict a wide variety of work behaviours and attitudes.

What is the Five-Factor Model (THE BIG 5)

O.C.E.A.N

1. Openness to experience.

   1. Imaginative, curious, cultured.

2. Conscientiousness

   1. Organized, disciplined, careful.

3. Extraversion

   1. Outgoing, gregarious, fun-loving.

4. Agreeableness

   1. Trusting, cooperative, flexible.

5. Neuroticism (Emotional Stability)

   1. Anxious, insecure, vulnerable to stress.

What are the strengths of Personality Inventories.

• Relatively cheap

• Easy to administer

• Little adverse impact

• Predicts best when based on a job analysis

What are the weaknesses of Personality Inventories?

• Scale development

• Validity

• Faking

What is an Emotional Intelligence Test?

• Ability to control and recognize emotions.

• Trait v. Information processing

What is Integrity Testing?

• Predict whether person will engage in dishonest behaviours.

• Estimate the probability that applicants will steal money, time or merchandise.

• Overt v. Personality

What is the prevalence of drugs in the workplace?

1. 2019, 49% of U.S. organizations tested for drugs.

2. 2007, 8.9% of employees admitted to using drugs in the past month

Why is drug testing important?

Drug users are more likely to:

• Miss work

• Use health care benefits

• Be fired or quit

• Have an accident

What is Biographical Information (Biodata)?

• A selection method that considers an applicant’s life, school, military, community, and work experience.

  • Simply asks people what you wish to know.

• Biographical inventory

  • More detailed background information.

Empirical vs. Rational

What are the Strengths of Biodata?

• Can predict in a variety of jobs.

• Can predict for a variety of criterion measures.

• Predictive of job performance.

• Higher organizational profit and growth.

• Easy to use, quickly administered, inexpensive, and not subject to individual bias.

What are the 3 ways an Interview might differ?

1. Structure

2. Style

3. Medium

What is the structure of an interview?

1. Structured

2. Unstructured

What is the style of an interview?

• One-on-one

• Serial

• Return

• Panel

• Group

What is a medium in an Interview?

• Face-to-face

• Telephone

• Videoconference

• Written

What are the advantages to a structured interview?

• Job relatedness

• Standardized scoring

• Incremental validity

• Viewed more favourably in courts than unstructured interviews

Why are unstructured interviews not optimal?

They are:

• Unreliable

• Not valid

• Legally problematic

Because they:

• Are not job related

• Rely on intuition, “amateur psychology”, and talk show methods.

How to create a Structured Interview?

• Determine the KSAO’s to tap in the interview

• Create interview questions

• Create a scoring key for interview answers.

How do you determine the KSAOs to tap?

Through job analysis:

• Tasks performed

• Conditons under which they are performed

• KSAOs needed to perform the tasks

• When KSAOs are needed:

  • Before and after hire.

How to create Interview Questions?

Six-types of interview questions:

1. Clarifiers.

2. Disqualifiers

3. Skill-level determiners

4. Future-focused questions/situational questions.

5. Past-focused questions/patterned-behaviour description interviews (PBDIs)

6. Organizational-fit questions

How to create a scoring key for interview answers?

• Right/Wrong Approach

• Typical Answer Approach

  • Benchmark Answers

• Key Issues Approach

What are Interviews Facts?

• Face-to-face meetings with one or more interviewers.

• Used in almost every hiring situation.

• Used to gather information about applicant and interpersonal behaviour.

• Interviewer can affect answers of interviewee.

• Can now be conducted remotely.

What are the 6-factors that contribute to the validity of a structured interview?

1. Questions should be standardized.

2. Interviewer should have detailed information about the job.

3. Interviewer should not have prior information about the interviewee.

4. Interviewee should not be evaluated until the interview is finished.

5. Interviewer should rate individual dimensions of the interviewee, rather than making an overall rating.

6. Interviewers should be trained in how to conduct a valid structured interview.

How to conduct the Structured Interview?

• Build rapport

• Explain the process and the agenda

• Ask the questions

• Score the answers and take notes after each question

• Provide information about the job and the organization (e.g., salary, benefits, climate)

• Answer interviewee’s questions

• End the interview on a pleasant note

What are some new contributions in personality measures in personnel selection?

• Non-cognitive tests in personnel selection

• Validity coefficients

• Faking in high-stakes assessments

• Conditional reasoning measures

• Elaboration of self-reported responses as means of to reduce faking.

• Using forced choice item formats

What are conditional reasoning tests?

• Designed to reduce faking.

• Applicants are given a series of statements and asked to select the reason that justifies each statement.

What are Work Samples?

• Applicants perform tasks that replicate actual job tasks.

• Advantages:

  • Directly related to the job

  • Good criterion validity

  • Good face validity

  • Less adverse impact that cognitive ability

  • Provide realistic job previews

• Disadvantages

  • Can be expensive to develop and maintain

What are the techniques related to Assessment Centers?

A selection technique that uses multiple job-related assessment exercises and multiple assessors to observe and record behaviours of candidates performing job-related tasks.

• Simulation of management and other white-collar jobs.

• In US, used mainly for promotion and selection of managers.

• Overall scores valid predictors of performance.

What are some tasks of assessment centers?

• In-basket exercise

• Leaderless group exercise

• Problem-solving simulation

• Role-play exercise

What are the weaknesses of Assessment Centers?

• Very expensive

  • Better methods are more cost-effective.

• Time-consuming

• Ability of an assessment center developed at one location may not predict performance in similar jobs at other locations.

• May have an adverse impact on some groups.

Most assessment centers share the following characteristics:

• Assessment done in groups.

• Assessment is done by groups - assessment center evaluators usually managers.

• Multiple methods of assessment are employed including individual exercise and group exercise.

• Assessment centers have higher relevance as they are simulators of real work environments.