Discussion/Business Finance – Management
Each stakeholder in the selection process – line managers, coworkers, and applicants – has distinctly different needs, desires, and goals for selection. Discuss whether each stakeholder’s needs, desires, and goals for selection should be equally weighted. Explain why or why not giving specific examples to support your response. Refer to Chapter 3 for information on the selection process.
Summary
Employee preferences for work may vary by age. Sources for recruiting employees for jobs include Web-based recruitment sites, referrals from current employees, job fairs, and help-wanted ads. Realistic job previews provide accurate information about positive and negative aspects of a job.
An organization’s employee selection program requires several steps: conducting job and work analyses, establishing requirements and cutoff levels, recruiting, administering selection devices, and validating the selection devices by determining how they correlate with measures of subsequent job performance.
Equal employment opportunity legislation mandates fair employment practices in hiring. Selection techniques should be job related and should minimize adverse impact on minority groups. Companies must also try to prevent reverse discrimination against qualified members of the majority group. Fair employment practices appear to have had a minimal impact on organizational effectiveness. Targets of discrimination may include minorities, older workers, women, disabled persons, gay persons, and unattractive people.
Job analysis involves a detailed description of the component tasks performed on a job. Job analysts can use already published work analyses available on O*NET, interview the people directly concerned with the job, observe workers performing the job, have workers keep a systematic activity log, or record critical incidents related to successful job performance. On the basis of the information collected, a job specification can be written that defines the characteristics to be sought in job applicants.
Application blanks on paper or online provide information about job candidates that can be directly related to their probability of success on the job. Biodata inventories are useful in predicting job success and are similar to psychological tests in objectivity and types of questions. Because many companies are reluctant to release information on former employees for fear of lawsuits, it can be difficult to confirm the accuracy of information provided on applications.
Although the face-to-face or online interview consistently receives unfavorable evaluations in research on employee selection, most companies continue to use it. The weakest type of interview is the unstructured interview; the structured interview is a more valid predictive device but it is seldom used because it seems too expensive and time-consuming. All interviews exhibit weaknesses: failure of interviewers to agree on the merits of a job candidate, failure of interviews to predict job success, subjectivity of interviewers’ standards of comparison, and interviewers’ personal prejudices. In the situational interview, questions related to actual job behaviors are developed from a critical-incidents job analysis; this may be the most valid type of interview for predicting an applicant’s potential for job success. In puzzle interviews, applicants are asked to solve puzzles as a way of determining their critical thinking skills and their ability to reason under pressure. Interviewers’ judgments can be biased by prior information, the contrast effect, the halo effect, and personal prejudices.
Letters of recommendation are part of most employee selection programs. They are limited, however, because of the recognized tendency of writers to be overly kind and the reluctance of employers to reveal more than basic, factual information so as to avoid lawsuits.
In assessment centers, job candidates perform exercises that realistically simulate problems found on the job. Through the use of the in-basket technique, the leaderless group discussion, oral presentations, and role playing, applicants are assessed by trained managers on their interpersonal skills and their leadership and decision-making abilities. Assessment c
