SELECTION METHODS

Selection Methods With Respect To Their Usability, Reliability, and Validity in Predicting Employees Performance

Selection Methods With Respect To Their Usability, Reliability, and Validity in Predicting Employees Performance

In today's highly competitive world markets personnel assessment and selection is one of the key methods available to organisations to ensure that they have effective workforces (Smith & Robertson, 1993). Acquiring and retaining high quality personnel is seen as key to organisational success (Pfeffer, 1994, cited in Shakleton & Newell, 1997), and successful selection and assessment of staff therefore presents a significant challenge to organisations, particularly in the face of growing skill shortages (Cunrow, 1989) and forecasts of a considerable drop in the numbers of young people that will be available for work in the decade ahead (Warr, 1996). And yet, in the absence of any perfect method of assessment and selection, organisations continue to use a variety of imperfect methods in their attempts to predict which individuals will be successful in particular job roles. The following paragraphs will examine the continuing widespread preference of organisations for using assessment and selection methods with less predictive validity than others, and will consider what can be done to persuade human resources practitioners to modify their organisations' approaches towards ensuring better matches between individuals and job roles. In particular, the prevalence of the traditional employment interview as the primary selection method will be compared to the alternative methods of cognitive ability tests and biographical data.

Whilst the assessment and selection process provides information for decisions by both the employer and the potential employee, this is not the traditional view as employment decisions have long been regarded as a management prerogative (Torrington & Hall, 1991). However, given the predicted skill shortages and the fact that selection is also concerned with the future life plans of individuals, the predictive validity of selection methods is an important issue (Meijer, 1998) both for organisations and for individuals. Predictive validity refers to the extent to which an assessment measure can predict subsequent job performance (Smith et al, 1993) such as error rate, production rate, appraisal scores, absence rate, or other criteria that may be important to the organisation. Relationships between assessment outcomes and future performance are expressed as correlation coefficients (r), where r = 1 represents a perfect relationship, and r = 0 signifies that no relationship whatsoever exists. A correlation of, say, r= 0.4 is regarded as comparatively good in assessment and selection (Torrington et al, 1991), but this does illustrate that there are no methods of selection that represent outstanding predictors of future performance.

In their survey of management selection methods used in French and British organisations, Shackleton & Newell (1991) illustrated that, although there was an increasing use of personality assessments, cognitive ability tests, assessment centres and biographical data between the years of 1984 and 1989, the traditional method of face to face interviews continued to represent the dominant method of assessment and selection in the UK. The format of interviews may range from totally unstructured where no objectives are ...