Selection and Assessment Techniques

Selection and Assessment

An Introduction to the Various Techniques

The Interview
The Structured Interview
Psychometric Tests
Assessment Centers
Biodata

Personnel selection and assessment activities are integral parts of organizational life. The contemporary economic climate has seen an ever increasing level of staff turnover and personnel reorganization, and the abolition of the traditional view of 'a job for life'. Consequently, there is more pressure now on organizations and HR managers to fill vacant positions quickly and with the most appropriate individuals. Decisions about hiring and classifying applicants are based on expectations or predictions about their future work behaviors. When a company needs to recruit new staff or make promotion decisions about employees, there are various methods of assessment at its disposal. This article examines different methods of assessment and selection commonly used by organizations today; the interview, psychological tests, assessment centers and biodata.

Whatever selection procedure is used, it should yield the right type of information and lead to correct decisions being made. If a technique is successful it is said to be 'valid'. The validity of an assessment is basically what the procedure measures and how well it does so. Validity of a procedure can be represented as a single figure, indicating the strength of agreement between the average individual's score on an assessment and their later success in the selected field. This success is often called 'success on the criterion'. Research, however, has highlighted a gap that exists between what is recommended by professional HR or management consultants and what actually occurs in many organizations.

The Interview

In good selection practice each of the tools used are validated by examining how job-related they are and how well they predict a candidate's subsequent job performance. The job-relatedness of the traditional selection interview, which typically follows no particular pattern, is generally regarded as low. Interviews are still the most widely used selection tool by far, despite the fact that they are typically unreliable, invalid and subjective. Personnel selection interviews take a variety of forms but are essentially a conversation between a candidate and one or more interviewers with a specific purpose. The ubiquitous use of the unstructured selection interview in organizations attests to the faith that both employers and applicants have in the casual and unrestrained face-to-face conversation as a technique for selection. While it may be accepted that interviews will always be necessary in some shape or form, it is when a company relies solely on the interview that concerns over validity arise. One explanation for the consistently low validity in the unstructured interview is that different interviewers may rate the same information differently, and features that are irrelevant to the personal attributes required for the job such as age, race, appearance, sex, experience of interviews and the job market situation introduce bias into how interviewers evaluate information.

The Structured Interview

The Psychological Test

Assessment Centers

Biodata