Overview & Background of Personnel Staffing

Selection lives in the I side of IO, what does this mean?

I side was known for a while as personnel psych focused on differences among people applied in the workplace or creation of skills and knowledge.

What is the purpose of testing?

To measure differences among people! Who has more skill, less ability, more physical capability...

Company may want to know the answers to these questions before they hire them, goal is to find the best person for that situation.

How has measurement existed throughout history?

Chinese civil service exams: Designed a system where people who wanted to be a civil servant would go through several days of testing

Greek Philosopher Plato to identify soldiers:

Problem to identify soldiers who are tough on enemies but sweet with civilians. Still a question that united nations peacekeepers are navigating today.

How was testing emphasized during WWI?

During WWI they had to quickly assess who could do what in the armed forces, AKA where the best fit for someone was. Donald Patterson and one other helped develop selection testing, before heading to UMN to establish the psych department.

What has changed in more recent times about assessment and measurement?

People throughout history have noticed and tracked differences across people, what is different now is how we make those assessments --> it is more empirical and data driven

How is testing applied now?

(1) Occupational and educational testing of high school and college students to be applied for counseling (e.g. RAISEC or values based coaching

(2) College and university selection (paused during Covid but brought back due to missing the cognitive ability information about candidates)

(3) selection, classification, and talent management (succession planning, leadership identification, ...

What is testing all about

NOT for excluding people, it is about maximizing their assignment and fit to put people in the most optimal place

What is the importance of testing?

It gives information to the individual and the organization: Are your abilities and skills compatible with the job requirements? Do personal characteristics correspond with those associated with success in a given domain?

What are individual tests? As opposed to group tests

Individual taking test --> result for use with them (e.g. identification of mental challenges is always individual test)

What is a group test? As opposed to an individual test

Groups of individuals take tests, which is what we moved mostly into more recently (with AI we could and have moved back into individual tests 1:1 person with AI

What is intelligence?

knowledge on an entire domain (e.g. cognitive abilities)

What is ability?

any type of specific ability (e.g. physical, perceptual)

What is aptitude?

tries to highlight the ability of something, getting at the underlying version of the ability (usually naturally occurring)

What is an achievement test?

Once a level of knowledge in a domain has been achieved, it is measured through an achievement test. They look very much like a job knowledge test (e.g. Psych topic part of the GRE)

What is job knowledge and work sample?

Job knowledge is your knowledge about the job. Work sample is concerned with if you have the ability to carry the work out.

What is personality

non cognitive tendencies that people have to think, behave, feel, desire, in certain ways. NOT a capability, it is an automatic thing that people have

What are interests?

having a preference to engage in certain types of work or activities (even leisure) ** her work with police interests showed that they tend to have interest in outdoor activities (realistic) **

IMPORTANT DISTINCTION: What is a construct?

What we are trying to measure (an underlying characteristic

IMPORTANT DISTINCTION: What might you also see construct referred to as?

A predictor (things that you could have info on before you hire them onto the job) or criteria (things they end up doing on the job)

IMPORTANT DISTINCTION: What is a method?

Tools we use to measure characteristics

IMPORTANT DISTINCTION: What are different types of methods?

Interviews, assessment centers, psychometric tests (SJTs), Simulations, work samples, AI

IMPORTANT DISTINCTION: What don't people understand with construct vs. method?

HOW you measure people (method) is completely different from WHAT you are trying to measure (construct)

What is a test?

Tests are behavior samples! Any time you get a behavior sample it is a test. Whether or not the test actually covers the behavior of consideration is a function of the number and nature of its items.

What are different ways to talk about the nature and number of test items?

Test length (the longer you assess the better you'll be able to measure it)

Test content (you will only get info on what you ask about)

Item quality (content can be enhanced by how you ask about info)

Item format (true/false, free response...)

What is the goal of testing?

TO FORECAST! AKA to predict future behavior once they are employed by the company. it is important to get a good test so that forecasting is accurate)

What was selection like before 1977?

People were making different "tests" and finding different results, which made them believe that there was no tests that were generalizable to different jobs and companies and we needed to test each one in specific situations.

Why did validity generalizable problems happen before 1977?

Sampling error (chance element skewing your sample)

Unreliability in predictors (unreliability in what you're measuring and how you're measuring it)

Range restriction (excluding parts of the distribution which changes statistical results)

Artificial dichotomization of variables

What was more common in selection research before 1977?

Belief in situation specificity relating to job, org, measure, and culture

IMPORTANT: What changed in selection research in 1977?

META ANALYSIS: pulling together single studies from the whole field to assess validity, developed by Schmidt and Hunter (1977)

What is a frequency distribution?

for continuous variables, it gives info about the relative position of an individual within a group

What is a normal curve?

Most human characteristics are normally distributed because they are determined by multiple things

How do we measure central tendency?

Mode (value seen most often) Median (value in the center)

Mean (average of all values)

How do you explain variance?

With measures of variability, what are we varying from? We vary from the middle. You can take the most extreme person's value and compare it to the middle, but you'll have people on the lowest side and the highest side that are just as extreme. In both cases you can take the distance to get rid of the direction and square it (since we only care about how varied the value is). Of course you will have to do this for everyone you measured, and then divide it by the number of people you have. = average squared distance from the center.

Why is standardization so important?

Standardization is the ONLY way that you can compare individuals within the same trait and individuals within different traits to see which is their strongest and weakest trait

When does standardization become a big issue?

With group tests, makes it super hard to compare people if they took the tests under different conditions for example.