2 - Workplace Selection Flashcards
What is selection?
Matching a person to a job or organisation, and evaluating the effectiveness of that match
What information do you need to undergo personnel selection?
- What the job requires
- What the person has to offer (KSAOs)
- How well the person performs in that type of work.
What are KSAOs?
Knowledge
Skills
Abilities
Other
What is the utility in the selection process?
- Company performance depends on employees
- It’s costly to recruit and hire employees
- There are legal implications of incompetent selection
- Can depend on selection ratio and base rate of success
What is the selection ratio?
Number of job vacancies/number of applicants
If above or equal to 1, utility decreases.
If below 1, utility increases
What is the base rate of success?
Base rate: the proportion of hires considered successful before implementation of selection system.
Higher the base rate, less likely a new system will be beneficial.
What are the steps in the selection process?
- Employee Recruitment
- Employee Screening
- Employee Selection and Placement
- Validity Check
Explain the Employee Recruitment process in selection
- Process by which companies attract qualified applicants
- Employee referrals and applicant-initiated contracts yield higher quality workers with lower turnover rates compared to newspaper ads or employment agency placement.
- May involve RJP
What are Realistic Job Previews and what are their benefits and consequences?
An accurate presentation of the prospective job and organisation made to applicants.
- Increase job commitment and satisfaction, decrease turnover
- Allow self selection of applications, lower unrealistically high job expectations and provide information that will be useful for the job.
- But, applicants more likely to turn down job offer after RJP
What are some of the ways employees are screened?
- Applications and resumes (collects biographical information, hard to evaluate and interpret this information to determine most qualified workers)
- References (limited importance as typically biased and litigation against employers who give bad references; waive rights of applicants)
- Employee Testing (standardised testing typically to measure biodata, cognitive and mechanical ability etc.)
- Assessment Centres (Structured setting, monitored by group of evaluators, and used in large organisations for managerial positions, can be very costly)
- Interviews (traditional unstructured or structured)
What is employee screening?
Process of reviewing information about job applicants to select workers
Explain the differing things employment testing can measure
- Biodata: background information and personal characteristics. Can be discriminatory but effective for screening and placement
- Cognitive Ability: tests of general intellectual ability. Predictive of job success but moderated by complexity of job (higher complexity = more useful)
- Mechanical: good for construction/engineering
- Motor and Sensory Ability
- Job Skills and Knowledge
- Personality
- Integrity (honesty through questions)
- Other Tests (drug testing)
Explain what Job Skills and Knowledge Tests look at?
Work samples test: measure applicants abilities to perform brief examples of important job tasks
- Clearly job related but is expensive and time consuming. One of the best predictors of job performance
Job Knowledge test: measure specific types of knowledge required to perform job
What do personality tests demonstrate in employment selection?
Work related personality characteristics can be reasonably good predictors of job performance, especially when derived from job analysis.
Some used to screen out applicants with psychopathologies
E.g. Conscientiousness: performance across jobs, teamwork and training
Explain Traditional Unstructured Interviews
Ask questions that come to mind with no formalized “scoring”
May diminish stereotype judgement, but physically attractive people hired more (not by most experienced managers)
Give rise to poor selection decisions and lack predictive validity.
