Psychology & Work Today

Employee Selection Principles and

Techniques

Chapter 3
 Learning Objectives

After reading Chapter 3, you should be able to:

1. Explain the recruitment process and the importance of
recruiter characteristics, campus recruiting, and realistic job
previews
2. Understand the selection process and the critical contribution
of job and worker analyses
3. Explain the legal and regulatory aspects of fair employment
practices, including how to determine adverse impact, what
are discriminatory questions, and reverse discrimination
4. Define job analysis, what it’s used for, and how it is conducted
5. Compare and contrast four major techniques for employee
selection: biographical information, interviews, references and
letters of recommendation, and assessment centers

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What Are You Looking For In A Job?

• Challenging work • Respect from one’s

• High salary boss
• Job security • Opportunity to learn
• Stock options new skills
• Good working hours • Fair/loyal supervisor
• Good working • Being asked for your
conditions opinion
• Compatible co-workers • Help with personal
problems
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 Recruiting Sources

• Online search services

• Help-wanted ads
• Current employee referrals
• Networking & personal contacts
• Employment agencies/headhunters
• Professional associations
• Job fairs
• Outplacement agencies
• Campus interviews
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Characteristics of Successful Recruiters

• Personal characteristics
• Smiles & nods
• Eye contact & Empathy
• Thoughtful & Warm
• Competent
• Stays on topic
• Provides information about company
• Solicits information about applicant
• Answers applicant’s questions

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 Realistic Job Preview

• A recruitment technique that acquaints

prospective employees with positive and
negative aspects of a job
• Correlates positively with
• job satisfaction
• job performance
• reduced turnover

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 Steps in the Selection Process

• Job analysis
• Worker analysis
• Determine anticipated selection ratio
• Identify selection techniques
• Select and classify new employees
• Evaluate selection methods for:
• Validity – did we hire the right people?
• Fair employment practices
• Evidence of adverse impact

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 Fair Employment Practices

• Conformity with:
• EEOC regulations
• 1964 & 1991 Civil Rights Acts
• Equal opportunities in employment for all, regardless of race,
religion, sex, or national origin
• Protect against....
• Adverse impact on minority or protected groups
• Discriminatory questions in interviews or on application
blanks
• Reverse discrimination

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 Determining Adverse Impact

• “Four Fifths” Rule

• Selection ratio for minority group may be no
less than 80% of that of the majority group
• Selection ratio is the number of applicants
selected divided by the number of applicants
• Example: If the selection ratio for the
majority group is 50%, then the selection
ratio for the minority group should not be
less than 40%

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 Possible Disadvantages of Equal
Opportunity Programs

• Perception of reverse discrimination

• Which groups are most positive toward
affirmative action?
• Women
• Blacks
• Hispanics
• Stigmatizing of those hired (e.g., Heilman
research)

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 Federally Protected Groups

• An employer cannot discriminate based on:

• Sex
• Race
• National Origin
• Religion
• Age - workers over 40
• Disability
• Status as Vietnam veteran
• Not protected on the basis of:
• Sexual orientation
• Physical attractiveness

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 Purpose of Job & Work Analysis

• Job analysis
• The study of a job to describe in specific
terms the nature of the component tasks
performed by the workers
• Work analysis
• The study of specific tasks and worker skills
that can be transferred from one job to
another

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 Conducting Job & Work Analysis

• Refer to previously conducted analyses

• U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational
Information Network (O*NET)
• Interviews
• Direct observation
• Systematic activity logs
• Critical incidents

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 Information Provided by O*NET

• Person requirements
• Person characteristics
• Experience requirements
• Job requirements
• Labor market
• www.online.onetcenter.org/

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 Job Analysis Interview

• Performed by Subject Matter Experts (SME’s)

• Incumbent workers
• Supervisors
• Trained HR personnel
• Person interviewed should be told purpose of
interview and need to answer accurately and
completely.

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 Job Analysis Questionnaires

• Unstructured questionnaire
• open-end approach
• Structured questionnaire
• Position Analysis Questionnaire (PAQ)
• 194 job elements organized into six categories
• information input
• mental processes
• work output
• relationships with other persons
• job context
• other job activities & conditions

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 Direct Observation in Job Analysis

• Beware
• People may behave differently when they are
being watched
• Hawthorne Effect
• Analyst should be unobtrusive
• Sample should be representative
• Electronic monitoring is a possibility
• privacy issues

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 Systematic Activity Logs

• Employees and supervisors maintain

detailed written records of their activities
during a specified time
• Logs can provide job details not available
from other methods

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 The Critical-Incidents Technique

• Identifies incidents or behaviors that are

necessary to successful job performance
• Focuses on specific activities or behaviors
that lead to desirable or undesirable
consequences on the job
• Goal is to have SME’s indicate behaviors
that separate a good from a bad
performer

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 Employee Selection Techniques

• Biographical information (Biodata)

• Interviews
• References and letters of recommendation
• Assessment centers
• Psychological tests (Chapter 4)

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 Biodata

• Collecting biographical information is a

common method of job selection
• Assumes that past experiences and personal
traits can predict work behavior & success
• May be paper or
• online
• home computer
• kiosks
• recruiting stations
• computer generated phone screening
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 Techniques For Collecting Biodata

• Application blanks
• Biographical inventory

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 Application Blanks

• It’s crucial to determine what information

to request
• Each question must be correlated with
job success
• How honest is the response?
• Use follow-up interviews
• Check employers & references

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 Biographical Inventory

• A more systematized form of application

blank
• Longer and in greater detail
• Assumes on-the-job behavior is related to
biodata
• Each item must be researched and validated
• Properly developed biographical
inventories show high predictive value
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 Interviews and First Impressions

• Key variables
• Perceived attractiveness, sociability, & skill at self-
promotion
• Verbal and Non-verbal cues
• Maintaining eye contact, smiling, leaning toward the
interviewer, & friendly hand gestures
• Low pitched voice with vocal inflections
• Impression Management
• Ingratiation
• Self-promotion

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 Types of Interviews

• Unstructured interview
• Structured interview
• Situational interview

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 The Unstructured Interview

• Format and questions asked are left to the

discretion of the interviewer
• Lacks advance planning
• Potentially different questions for each candidate
• Criticisms
• Lack of consistency in assessing candidates
• Low validity for predicting job performance
• Interviewer training can improve usefulness

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 The Structured Interview

• Uses a predetermined list of questions asked of

every candidate
• Printed form
• Applicant’s responses recorded
• Results are greatly improved over unstructured
interviews
• Structured interviews can be as valid as
cognitive ability tests
• Still rarely used due to perceived cost, time and
loss of control by interviewer
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 The Situational Interview

• Focus is on the behaviors needed for successful

performance
• Development of interview
1. Prepare list of critical incidents
2. Determine benchmarks for scoring the incidents
3. Translate incidents into interview questions
• Generally used to select workers for semi-skilled
and skilled factory jobs, sales, & first line
supervisors
• Correlate positively with later work performance
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Influences on Interviewer Judgment
• Applicant characteristics
• Personality, physical attractiveness, etc.
• Prior information
• May predispose interviewer to favor a particular
candidate (e.g., knowledge of psych eval. results)
• Contrast effect
• Impressions of prior candidates influence opinion of
subsequent candidates
• Personal prejudices
• e.g., Halo effect – tendency to judge all aspects of a
person’s behavior or character on the basis of a single
attribute
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 References and Letters of
Recommendation

• Intended to examine others’ opinions of

candidate and verify information provided
by candidate
• Often paint a false picture of the
applicant
• Positive bias
• Fear of lawsuits for defamation or providing
inaccurate information

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 Assessment Centers

• Method of selection that places candidate

in a simulated job situation to evaluate
behavior under stress
• Originally called situational testing
• Usually involve 6-12 candidates
• Evaluated through a series of exercises over
several days
• In-basket technique
• Leaderless group discussions
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 Advantages of Assessment Centers

• Can be highly valid predictor of job success for

management and entry-level positions
• On the job evaluations 2-4 years later correlated
highly with assessment center results (Dayan, Kasten,
& Fox, 2002)
• May be a more equitable way of evaluating
management skills of candidates of different
racial and ethnic backgrounds
• But ...
• Interpersonal skills count strongly, and active and
forceful participants are rewarded
• Negative impact on self concept if they perform poorly
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 Key Terms

• Adverse impact • Leaderless group

• Assessment centers discussion
• Biographical inventories • Realistic job previews
• Critical-incidents • Reverse discrimination
technique • Selection ratio
• Halo effect • Situational interviews
• Impression management • Situational testing
• In-basket technique • Structured interviews
• Job analysis • Unstructured interviews
• Work analysis

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