Evaluating Selection Methods
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Selecting Employees Without Getting into Legal Trouble
Selection involves deciding which of the people who have been recruited will be selected to work
in the organization. The selection process has management and legal consequences that must be
taken into account before making final selections. Getting the most qualified individual for each
position is a major goal, as is hiring people in fair and legal ways. A good hiring process will
prevent possible litigation as well as other problems that can occur later on when an organization
hires the wrong people.
Selecting people to work in an organization takes into consideration both objective criteria and
the judgment of experienced managers. Objective criteria include whether the applicant's
qualifications are reliably and validly linked to the needs of the organization. Judgment criteria
deal more with the perception and observations of the managers hiring the individual. Both
objective and judgment criteria are essential to a good selection decision.
Looming over the entire selection process are three questions:
1. Who is best qualified to work in this particular position?
2. Who best will help the organization meet its goals?
3. Is the selection process fair and equitable, and does the selection process follow EEO
guidelines?
Who is best qualified is not an easy question. The best-qualified person may not be the best
person to help the organization meet its goals. What if there is an employee at a restaurant who
is acknowledged by everyone there as the fastest and most efficient employee? Her productivity
is greater than any other individual who works there. That employee, however, is constantly
complaining and creating problems with other employees and is known to steal food from the
restaurant. She is the best-qualified employee from the standpoint of doing the job, but she may
hinder the overall organization in meeting its goals.
Whether the selection process is fair and equitable may end up being decided by a court of law,
so human resources managers must be aware of how EEO guidelines affect the hiring process.
Courts require that the selection process be valid. Being valid means that the selection process
is using data that shows that the skills being used as selection criteria are needed for a person to
do the job. It may not be a valid selection criterion if there is a requirement that a person needs
a college degree to work on an assembly line. What a person learns in college may not relate to
the skills they need to work on an assembly line.
Reliability means that the selection instruments for getting the job consistently measure the
same. If a person takes a test for a job, they should be able to take the same or a similar test
later and get the same test score.
If an organization is going to use a test to determine qualifications for a position, they should
make sure the test is both valid and reliable. It can be very expensive to hire a consultant to
prove that the test is job-related so that it can be considered valid and reliable. Many
organizations have overcome the validity problem with tests by using tests for common positions
(police, fire, computer skills, etc.). These tests are readily available from various consulting firms
that have already proven the validity and reliability of that test for that particular position. Other organizations have done away with tests altogether and rely solely on interviews for selection
purposes. The courts do not question the validity of interviews as critically as they do pen-and-
paper tests.
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Application forms and biographical data may predict how well a person might perform a job, so
application forms and biographical data can be shown to have validity in some cases. The
predictability seems to be higher in weighted application blanks (WABs) and in biographical
information blanks (BIBs). Research has been done on both WABs and BIBs that shows the
validity of the questions used for the specific jobs for which the questions were screening.
General application forms may not be valid and may ask questions that could be the basis for
lawsuits. An example of a common question that is on most general application forms is asking
for the date someone graduated from high school. Using this date, a manager could determine
an applicant's age. It is illegal to make a negative hiring decision based on someone being over
the age of 40, because of the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA). Someone who did
not get the job could claim that the reason was that the hiring person(s) could tell they were
over 40. It is best to ask only for information that is directly related to the job, because if you
know things about the person that are unrelated to the job, the person may claim that you
discriminated against them because of the information you knew.
Reference checks are advisable and was discussed last week, they can be helpful in preventing
negligent hiring. However, they often do not yield any useful information. Several successful
lawsuits have been made against former managers who gave former employees bad references
without having information to back up the bad references. As a manager, it is advisable not to
give any information out about someone who has worked for you without records to prove that
what you say is true. Because of this threat, most managers will not give more information than
things that are a matter of record, such as the dates a person worked for the organization and
the number of days that person was absent from work. It is also advisable for an employer to
check on the accuracy of any educational pursuits by checking on transcripts.
Many tests eliminate minorities at a rate that is higher than that at which they eliminate
Caucasians. This may be related to the tests being culturally biased in favor of the typical
Caucasian cultural experience, or it may be because some minorities have poorer educational
opportunities in their early lives. This bias in testing can cause a disparate impact on some
protected status groups. If the test can be proven valid for the specific job being hired for, the
courts may accept this disparate impact as being acceptable because the test is job-related. Be
aware that the courts may be suspicious of culture-related tests, especially personality tests or
tests that are based on behavior traits.
Performance tests that are designed to simulate the type of work a person will be doing if they
are hired tend to have good predictive validity. This is especially true if these performance tests
are part of an evaluation by an assessment center. Assessment centers use a number of tools to
test a person's ability to do a particular job. Among these tools are in-basket exercises, problem
analyses, group-interaction evaluation, presentations by the applicant, and role-playing
exercises. These tests may be combined with paper-and-pen tests to gain a greater
understanding of the job applicant's abilities.
The courts do not usually hold interviews to validity standards that are as strict as those used for
tests for two reasons:
1. Interviews usually occur later in the hiring process, so all of the people who make it to the interview stage are usually qualified to do the job.
2. Interviews involve judgment by managers who may have expertise about a particular job that the courts do not have, so the courts do not want to second-guess the judgment of someone who has more knowledge about the job than the courts have.
The main types of interviews are:
• structured interviews in which all applicants are asked the same questions
• panel interviews in which several people from the organization interview the candidate at the same time
• situational interviews in which an applicant is asked what they would do in a particular situation
• behavioral interviews in which the applicant is asked how they have acted in the past in a setting that relates to the job for which they are being interviewed
• stress interviews in which the interviewer puts the interviewee under pressure to see how the interviewee handles that pressure
Interviews may lead to more discrimination than tests because more human judgment is used.
Human judgment is subject to biases and to trying to fit the person to the position. By having a
predetermined image of what type of person will fit a position, or an organization, an interviewer
may unintentionally discriminate against someone, especially if the interviewee has a trait that is
easily observable, such as race, gender, disability, or age—all protected statuses. The selection
process involves selecting the best person to do a particular job, but it also involves making sure
the organization is being fair, equitable, valid, and reliable in the assessment of those individuals
it hires.