Day 11- Selection Flashcards
Can do vs Will do
Can do:
what employees are capable of (knowledge, skills, abilities)
Will do:
What employee will actually do when they get into the job.
(personality, values, motivation)
What to look for in top quality assessments
Validity Reliability Normative Data Measurement of bona fide job requirements Defensible (test bias) Ongoing research and refinements Credentials of the test developers Qualifications of the assessors
Classification of Employment tests
Screening
-Can do & will do
Ability
-Can do
Personality
-Will do
Interests
-Will do
Interviews
-Can do & will do
Personality Testing- The Big Five Traits
Extraversion (sometimes called Surgency):
The broad dimension of Extraversion encompasses such more specific traits as talkative, energetic, and assertive.
Agreeableness:
Includes traits like sympathetic, kind, and affectionate.
Conscientiousness:
Includes traits like organized, thorough, and planful. (thinking carefully)
Neuroticism (sometimes reversed and called Emotional Stability): Includes traits like tense, moody, and anxious.
Openness to Experience (sometimes called Intellect or Intellect/Imagination):
Includes traits like having wide interests, and being imaginative and insightful.
Socially Desirable Responding (Faking)
Altering responses to represent what the employer wants
Two forms
Impression management
Self-deceptive enhancement (over confident)
Reducing Socially Desirable Responding:
-Bogus pipeline (ways to detect lies)
- Social Desirability Scales
- -SDE example: my first impressions of people usually turn out to be right
- -IM example: I never swear (asked about extreme behavior)
- Forced Choice Response Scales (two questions side by side that are equally desirable and they have to choose one)
- Response times (if taking a long time, thinking about what the employer wants not what they think)
- Response patterns
Socially Desirable Responding (Faking)
The two forms
Impression management
Self-deceptive enhancement (over confident)
Socially Desirable Responding (Faking)
Reducing it
-Bogus pipeline (ways to detect lies)
- Social Desirability Scales
- -SDE example: my first impressions of people usually turn out to be right
- -IM example: I never swear (asked about extreme behavior)
- Forced Choice Response Scales (two questions side by side that are equally desirable and they have to choose one)
- Response times (if taking a long time, thinking about what the employer wants not what they think)
- Response patterns
Cognitive Ability Tests
Measures of a person’s capacity to learn or acquire skills or what a person knows or can do right now.
Examples: Bennett Mechanical Comprehension Test, Minnesota Clerical Test, Wonderlic Personnel Test, Weschler Adult Intelligence Scale
Note:
Better for job performance prediction
Assessment Centres
Work Sample Tests and Simulations:
-In-basket exercise (provide ppl with simulations with a fake company with a fake job and decisions that come along with it) (helps recognize over arching themes)
-Leaderless group discussion
Role-playing exercise (see who takes which role, etc, leader)
-Presentations and business cases
-Computer Simulations
Interviews & Psychometric assessments
Integrity Tests
Polygraph Testing
- Reliability issues and intrusive
- Not legally defensible
Paper & Pencil / online assessments
- Overt vs. non-overt tests
- –Overt- direct (have you stolen from work?)
- –Non overt- personality test (more indirect questions (how many people do you think have stolen from work? Tend to guess higher if they are guilty of it))
Background Checks
Checking References
E-mail and telephone checks
-Specific job-related information
Letters of reference
- Teachers
- Employers
Automated reference checks:
- Might be easier to lie online
- Hard to show outstanding achievements
- Good to compare self assessment and reference assessment
- If all questions are positive all the way down, easy to tell if they are lying
- Quite valid way to check references
Note:
Not the best way of predicting job performance
People always include people that will give them great reviews
Reference may say good thing as they don’t want to hurt their chances
Employment Interviews
Formal, in-depth conversation conducted to evaluate the applicant’s acceptability
Most widely used selection technique
- Allows a personal impression
- Opportunity to sell a job to a candidate
- Opportunity to answer candidate’s questions
- Effective public relations tool
- Popular due to flexibility and creates two-way exchange
- Interviewers maintain great faith and confidence in their judgments.
Unskilled and Unaware of it
Trend of how people rate themselves
Least skilled overrate themselves
Most skilled underrate themselves
If your not skilled you will not know what you did wrong, so will over estimate.
Common Errors & Biases
Leniency & Severity – providing inordinately easy or harsh ratings
Central Tendency- “Everyone is average”
Halo Effect – specific ratings assigned based on a general impression
Contrast Effect – quality of previous applicants influences rating of current applicant (may give lower rating to someone who went after someone amazing)
Information weighting – giving more weight to negative than positive information
Fundamental Attribution Error – rates do not consider the situational constraints of behavior
Similar-to-me error – favorable evaluation of applicant because he or she is similar to the interviewer in some way
Types of Interviews
Interviews may be conducted on-to-one, panel, or group interview
Unstructured interviews
- Few if any planned questions
- Lacks the reliability of a structures interview
Structured interviews
- Pre-determined set of questions
- Improves reliability and validity over traditional unstructured interviews.
