Staffing & Selection © Nancy Brown Johnson 2000

Selection  Determining who will staff the organization.  Includes: interviewing, tests, weighing education & experience, recommendations

Good Selection Pays Off  Firm performance depends on good people  Costly to recruit & train employees  Legal concerns of negligent hiring

What skills recruiters are looking for  Experience with finance  Enthusiastic about a new career  Hones, hard working  Aggressive & dedicated  Think out of the box, attention to details  Autonomous, work to meet customer needs  Willingness to relocate  Good communication & interpersonal skills  Intellectual quickness, courageous leadership, compelling communication, people development, proven track record, high personal standards  Ability to multi-task,  Responsible employee & leader  Strong work ethic  GPA, good references  Dedication & determination  Teamwork

Selection Instruments How to decide whether they are useful.

Reliability Am I measuring the attribute consistently ?

Reliability  Examples:  test-re-test: give people same test at two time periods  Inter-rater reliability: do different raters rate consistently

Validity  Validity - are you measuring what you want to measure?  In Selection: Does our selection instrument predict job performance? (Criterion Validity)

Key Definitions  Predictors - personnel selection devices.  Interviews  Ability Tests  Recommendations CCriterion - variable used to measure job performance. TTurnover AAbsenteeism PProductivity

Empirical Validation Statistically examines relationship between predictor & criterion scores.  Establish criterion measures  Obtain Predictor measures  Correlate predictor & criterion measures PredictorCriterion

Examine predictor/criterion relationship  Strength  scatter diagram  correlation coefficient  Statistical significance - whether results are real or due to chance.

Strength of Relationship predictor criterion

Content Validation Is the instrument capturing job content:  Expert judgement on test content  Is the tests content an accurate reflection of the job

Utility  Is the payoff from implementing new predictor worth it?  Weighs the potential benefits against the potential costs.  Utility depends on whether it improves the quality of individuals selected over what they would have been had the devise not been used.

Utility= quantity X quality - cost  Quantity = Number People Selected/Year  Quality =  What proportion of those selected considered successful?  What is good job performance worth?  What is the variation in good & bad job performance.  Selection rate  What is the validity of the test?  Cost = What does the selection test cost?

Raising Cut Score Performanc e Test Score

Changes in Cut Score  False positive-test says to hire but it was a mistake  False negatives-test says not to hire but would have been good employee

Raising Cut Score DDecreases false positives IIncreases false negatives

Interviews  Most frequently used and most controversial method of selection.  Other functions: public relations, organization communicates what it has to offer the applicant, and can fill in gaps in application blank.

Interviews Unreliable and Invalid  Difficult cognitive task:  manage conversation  listen  process information  Remember

Improving Interview Validity  Restrict the use of interviews to the KSAs that interviews can assess most effectively:  personal relations, sociability; &citizenship  Use structure - consistent information from applicants  Job related questions - direct and specific information about the job.

More on Improving Interview Validity  Formalize scoring - rating scales on a series of characteristics.  Team approach - several interviewers as a group interview the applicant. Train the interviewer  accurately receive information  critically evaluate information  regulate their own behavior in asking questions.

Behavioral or Situational Interview  Behavior: asks about behavior in the past  Situational: set up a situation, ask applicant to respond

Applications UUsed to get person's background & experience mminimum requirements ccomparing their strengths and weaknesses EEEOC guidelines recommend against certain questions with adverse impact. TThe questions need to be job related.

Lying  Applications were compared with factual data.  25% listed previous employers that said they were never employed  25% disagreement on reasons for leaving  57% duration of previous employment  72% on salary

Misuse and Bias  Weighted application blanks - scoring of application blank.  Weight questions related to job success  Must insure no weights for age, sex and marital status.

Ability Tests  Intelligence tests - yield a single intelligence score.  Mental ability tests - multiple scores: verbal work fluency, math, spatial relations.  Relatively high validity

Personality Tests  Personality - unique characteristics that define an individual.  Personality not clearly related to job performance except for some situations and for some purposes  tests don't identify dimensions important for job performance

Combining Methods  Multiple hurdle - Each test represents hurdle and if fails any level then don't get job.  Advantage - inexpensive  Compensatory - all tests given to everyone.  Exceptional performance may offset poor performance on another.  Advantage - higher validity.

Summary  The more systematic you can make selection devise the more reliable.  Improves validity