Staffing Flashcards
What is the staffing process?
- The process of ensuring that candidates with the requisite skills and qualities are successfully assessed, placed in the appropriate jobs or roles, and integrated into the organisation at the lowest cost
- Continuous, dynamic in nature and must flow from strategic objectives
- Position, selection criteria, assessment techniques
What is selection?
- Choosing from a group of applicants the best qualified candidate for a position
What is socialisation?
- Integrating the applicant into the organisation and developing them as members
What are the approaches to staffing?
- Psychometric-Objective
* Social Process
What is the psychometric-objective approach to staffing?
- Task-based job analysis
- Selection based on PJ fit
- Psychometric assessment
- Structured interviews
- Validation
- Selection
What is the social process approach to staffing?
- Person/Competency-based job analysis
- Selection based on organisation-individual fit
- Recruitment and Selection part of socialisation
- Post-employment socialisation
- Positive pyshcolical contracting e.g. realistic job previews
What do reactions to the selection process influence?
- Decision to join
- Decision to remain
- Level of work motivation
- Sense of belonging
What is selection fairness judged by?
- The content of selection measures
- The procedural fairness of the selection process
- The results of the selection process
What is fairness in the selection process?
- EEO: Equal Employment Opportunity
- Requires fair treatment for candidates
What are the pros/cons of EEO?
- Eliminates discriminatory recruiting practices
- Is about merit
- Takes specific action to ensure disadvantaged groups are given fair access to job opportunities
- Selects the best person for the job
- Attracts more demographically diverse candidates
What isn’t allowed to be asked about in the selection process according to EEO?
- Marital status
- Residential status
- National or ethnic origin
- Memberships with organisations
- Religion
- Photographs
- Race or colour
What is validity in the selection process?
- The extent to which a test measures what it is supposed to measure
What are the dimensions of validity?
- Construct validity
- Relevance of critera
- Content validity
- Representativeness of criteria
- Criterion-related validity
- Goodness of measures of writers to predict job success
How can predictive validity be increased in the selection process
- Predictive validity increases when you use complementary selection techniques (triangulated approach)
What is reliability?
- The consistency of test scores or criterion and predictor measures, and the degree to which interviews, tests and other selection procedures yield comparable data over a period of time
Broadly what can go wrong in the selection process?
- There are two types of error or criterion contamination coming from candidates and decision-makers
- Random contamination
- Systemic contamination
- Can be minimised
What does error cause?
- Error adds distortion to measurement
- Respondent error (response distortion, social desirability, faking, impression-management)
- Rater error (harshness error, stereotyping)
- Error thus diminishes the validity of measurement, and in turn inferences and decisions about human performance
What are the systemic errors in selection?
- Recency error
- Primacy error
- Similarity bias
- Stereotyping
- Similarity attraction
- Confirmatory bias
- Leniency
- Harshness
- Central tendency error
How are selection techniques decided on?
- Position description/specification » criterion domain » criterion measures/selection techniques
What is pre-selection?
- or initial screening
- Most organisations require applicants to complete an application form to enable a swift analysis of candidate-specification fit
- Used to develop a short list of candidates who will be further screened
- Assess the degree of convergence/match between applicants and critera
- Large discrepancies may warrant revision to recruiemtne strategies
What are the essential questions to be asked of the selection process?
- What are the selection criteria?
- What predictors and assessment techniques will be used
- What sequence will be used to measure the selection criteria
- How will the information collected be combined to make the selection decision
Categorically what are the types of selection techniques?
- Tests of performance
- Behavioural obsevation
- Self-reports
What are tests of performance in the selection process?
- Tests in which individuals perform some specific task
- Tests of specific abilities, skills, and proficiency
- Numeric ability etc
- Job Knowledge tests
- Behavioural and Situation based interviewing
What is behavioural observation in the selection process?
- Tests that involve the observation of individuals
- Observing behaviour and responses in a particular context
- Employment interviews, structured and uncstrucutes, situation vs behavioural, assessment centres
- Job samples tests
What are self-reports in the selection process?
- Tests in which the subject describes his or her feelings, attitudes, beliefs and interests
- Questionnaires, bio-data in application form
- Personality inventories
- Integrity tests
- Interview questions
What is important about interviews in regards to the selection process?
- The interview is an example of a technique that contains features of all three types of assessment
What are the interview approaches?
- Structured or directive
- Unstructured and non-directive
- Combined
- Panel
- Stress
- Group
What are the pros/cons of structured interviews?
- Consistent - Usually reliable
- Easy companions
- Can lack flexibility
- Doesn’t allow for following up
- Interviewer may dominate
What are the pros/cons of unstructured interviews?
- Easy to explore leads
- Applicant may be more relaxed
- Can be tailored to specific situations
- Hard to control
- Hard to compare
- May miss important areas
What are the pros/cons of panel interviews?
- Impartial
- Applicant closely observed
- Suited to higher level appointments
- Cost
- Applicant may feel outnumbered/intimidated
- Less chance of establishing rapport
What are the different techniques (not approaches) in interviewing?
- The same criterion (e.g. conflict resolution) can be addressed in different ways:
- Behavioural interviewing
- “In you previous work….”
- Situation-Based interviewing
- “If you had…”
What are the challenges of interviews?
- Panel can create stressful environment for the interviewee
- Porviding realistic job previews
- Scoring interviews and poor training of panelists, and weighting selection techniques
- Reliability
- Validity
What can affect the reliability of interviews?
- Systematic error rater and respondent error e.g. similarity bias, confirmation bias, recency bias, leniency
- Verification critical for self-reported data, the concern for being caught is an effective deterrent to faking
What can affect the validity of interviews?
- e.g panelists don’t understand the position and criterion domain and therefore do not know what questions to ask
- Training critical not just of the poison, but also potential rater bias and distortion
What are the elements of socialisation?
- Retaining talent
- Socialisation can start in the selection and assessment phase
- Induction
- Mentoring
- Integration
