Assessment Methods for Selection and Testing

Job Related Characteristics

• Many different characteristics of people are needed for a job (KSAO's)

  • Knowledge

  • Skill

  • Ability

  • Other personal characteristics

• KSAO's for each job determined by a job analysis

  • Through job analysis:

    • Tasks performed

    • Conditions under which they are performed

    • KSAOs needed to perform the tasks

    • When KSAOs are needed

      • Before hire

      • After hire

Psychological Tests

• A standardized series of problems or questions that assess a particular individual characteristic

  • Group vs. individual

  • Objective vs. open-ended

  • Paper and pencil vs. performance

  • Power vs. speed

• Ability tests

• Knowledge and skill tests

• Personality

Ability Tests

• Cognitive ability

• Perceptual ability

• Physical ability

• Psychomotor ability

Knowledge and Skill Tests

• Knowledge: What one knows

• Skill: What one is able to do

Personality

• Personality is a predisposition to behave in a particular way

• Problems:

  • Faking

  • Job relevance

Types of Abilities

• Cognitive

• Physical

• Psychomotor

• Perceptual

Cognitive Abilities

• Oral and written comprehension, oral and written expression, numerical facility, originality, memorization, reasoning, and general learning

• General mental ability (g)

• Related to employee performance across job type, job complexity, and country

• Strengths:

  • Highest validity of all selection measures

  • Easy to administer

  • Relatively inexpensive

• Weaknesses

  • Likely to cause adverse impact

  • Difficulty of setting passing score

• Some specific cognitive ability tests

  • Wonderlic Personnel Test

  • Siena Reasoning Test

Situational Judgement Test

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

• 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

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

Psychomotor Ability Tests

• Coordination

• Dexterity

• Reaction time

Physical Ability Tests

• Muscular strength

• Cardiovascular endurance

• Movement quality

Perceptual Ability Tests

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

Personality Tests

• Personality is a collection of traits that persist across time and situations and differentiate one person from another

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

Five-Factor Model (The Big 5)

• Openness to experience

  • Imaginative, curious, cultured

• Conscientiousness

  • Organized, disciplined, careful

• Extraversion

  • Outgoing, gregarious, fun-loving

• Agreeableness

  • Trusting, cooperative, flexible

• Neuroticism (emotional stability)

  • Anxious, insecure, vulnerable to stress

• High levels of conscientiousness and agreeableness and low levels of neuroticism is a good indicator of integrity

Evaluation of Personality Inventories

• Strengths

  • Relatively cheap

  • Easy to administer

  • Little adverse impact

  • Predicts best when based on a job analysis

• Weaknesses

  • Scale development

  • Validity

  • Faking

Emotional Intelligence Tests

• Ability to control and recognize emotions

• Trait vs information processing

Integrity Tests

• Intergrity

• Vocational interest

• Drug testing

Integrity

• Predict whether person will engage in dishonest behaviours

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

• Overt vs. personality

Drug Testing

• Use

  • In a survey published in 2019, 49% of U.S. organizations tested for drugs

  • In a survey published in 2007, 8.9% of employees admitted to using drugs in the past month

• Drug users are more likely to

  • Miss work

  • Use health care benefits

  • Be fired or quit

  • Have an accident

Biographical Information (Biodata)

• A selection method that considers an applicants life, school, military, community, and work experience

  • Simply asks people what you wish to know

• Biographical inventory

  • More detailed background information

• Empirical vs rational

• Examples of Biodata Items

  • Member of high school student government? Yes or no

  • Number of jobs in past 5 years? 1   2   3-5   More than 5

  • Transportation to work:  Walk   Bus   Bike   Own car   Other

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

Interviews Differ in Three Ways

• Structure

• Style

• Medium

Structure

• Unstructured

• Structured

Style

• One-on-one

• Serial

• Return

• Panel

• Group

Medium

• Face-to-face

• Telephone

• Videoconference

• Written

Structured Interviews Advantages

• Job relatedness

• Standardized scoring

• Incremental validity

• Viewed more favourably in courts than unstructured interviews

Unstructured Interviews Are Not Optimal

• They are:

  • Unreliable

  • Not valid

  • Legally problematic

• Because they:

  • Are not job related

  • Rely on intuition, "amateur psychology," and talk show methods

• Because they suffer from common rating problems

  • Primacy effects

  • Contrast effects

  • Negative-information bias

  • Interviewer-interviewee similarity

  • Interviewee appearance

  • Nonverbal cues

Common Unstructured Interview Questions

• Why should I hire you?

• Where do you see yourself five years from now?

• What are your greatest strengths?

• What are your greatest weaknesses?

• What subject did you most enjoy in college?

• How would you describe yourself?

• Why are you interested in this job?

Structured Interviews Are Optimal

• They are

  • Reliable

  • Valid

  • Not as prone to legal challenge

• Because they

  • Are based on a job analysis

  • Ask the same questions of each applicant

  • Have a standardized scoring procedure

Creating the Structured Interview

• Determine the KSAOs to tap in the interview

• Create interview questions

• Create a scoring key for interview answers

Determining the KSAOs to Tap

• Thorough job analysis:

  • Tasks performed

  • Conditions under which they are performed

  • KSAOs needed to perform the tasks

  • When KSAOs are needed

    • Before hire

    • After hire

Creating Interview Questions

• Six types of interview Questions:

  • Clarifiers

  • Disqualifiers

  • Skill-level determiners

  • Future-focused questions/situational questions

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

  • Organizational-fit questions

Examples of Clarifiers

• I noticed that you do not have an education section on your resume, could you tell me about your educational background?

• I noticed a three-year gap between two of your jobs, could you tell me a little about that?

• You were a bench hand at AT&T. What is that?

• Why did you leave your job at McDonald's?

Examples of Disqualifiers

• Can you work at least one weekend a month?

• Can you work overtime without notice?

• Would you be willing to treat a patient with AIDS?

• Do you have a valid driver's license?

Examples of Skill Determiners

• A customer brings you their chequebook and says that they cannot get it to balance. What are they probably doing wrong? How would you explain the error to them?

• A client calls and tells you that they have 10 computers in a 30' by 100' room and that they want to network the computers. What questions would you ask? What parts would you need to compile to complete the task?

• Several months after installing the above network, the client calls and says that nothing will print on the printer. What could be going on?

Examples of Future-Focused Questions

• Suppose that you were scheduled to work on Saturday. A fried calls on Thursday and says that you get to use a condo at the beach for free - but it has to be this weekend. What would you do?

• Imagine that you told a client that you would be there at 10:00am. It is now 10:30 and there is no way you will be finished with your current job until 11:30. You are scheduled to meet another client for lunch at 12:00 and then be at another job at 1:15. How would you handle the situation?

Examples of Past-Focused Questions

• When dealing with customers, it is inevitable that you will encounter an angry customer. Tell us about a time when a customer was angry at you. What did you do in that situation?

• The job of network engineer requires a good deal of customer service. Tell us about your customer service experience.

• This job involves persuading employees to follow our safety rules. Tell us about a time in the past when you had to persuade an employee to do something.

Examples of Organizational-Focused Questions

• Under what type of supervisor do you work best? Is there a type of supervisor for which you have trouble working?

• What type of work pace is best for you?

• Describe your sense of humour

• Describe your experience working with a culturally diverse group of people

Create a Scoring Key for Interview Answers

• Right/Wrong Approach

• Typical Answer Approach (benchmark answers)

• Key Issues Approach

Interview Facts

• Face-to-face meeting 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

Six Factors That Contribute to the Validity of a Structured Interview

• Questions should be standardized

• Interviewer should have detailed information about the job

• Interviewer should not have prior information about the interviewee

• Interviewee should not be evaluated until the interview is finished

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

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

Conducting the Structured Interview

• Build rapport

• Explain the process and the agenda

• Ask the questions

• Score the answer and take notes after each question

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

• Answer the interviewee's questions

• End the interview on a pleasant note

Viswesvaran, Deller, and Ones (2007)

• Personality measures in personnel selection:

  • Some new contributions

    • 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

Conditional Reasoning Tests

• Designed to reduce faking

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

Aggressive Individuals Tend to Believe

• Most people have harmful intentions behind their behaviour (hostile attribution bias)

• It is important to show strength or dominance in social interactions (potency bias)

• It is important to retaliate when wronged rather than try to maintain a relationship (retribution bias)

• Powerful people will victimize less powerful individuals (victimization bias)

• Evil people deserve to have bad things happen to them (derogation of target bias)

• Social customs restrict free will and should be ignored (social discounting bias)

An Example of a Forced-Choice Block is the Following:

• "Please choose one statement out of four statements that is MOST like your behaviour in work situations and one statement that is LEAST like your behaviour in work situations"

  • "I am the sort of person who…"

    1. Has a wide circle of friends

    2. Enjoys organizing people

    3. Relaxes easily

    4. Seeks variety

Conscientiousness

• Fear for the worst (Neuroticism, undesirable)

• Take advantage of others (Agreeableness, undesirable)

• Set high standards for myself and others (Conscientiousness, desirable)

• Take charge (extraversion, desirable)

Openness to Experience

• Keep others at a distance (Extraversion, undesirable)

• Feel sympathy for those who are worse off than myself (Agreeableness, desirable)

• Prefer to stick with things that I know (openness to experience, undesirable)

• Seldom get mad (neuroticism, desirable)

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 than cognitive ability

  • Provide realistic job previews

• Disadvantages

  • Can be expensive to develop and maintain

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

• Tasks of Assessment centers

  • In-basket exercise

  • Problem-solving simulation

  • Role-play exercise

• Overall scores valid predictors of performance

Evaluation of Assessment Centers: Weaknesses

• Weaknesses

  • 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

Fiske (1976) underlines that 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