Selecting Employees

DeNotra Geddis

April 11, 2005

Why Do Organizations Hire Employees?

• Employees are hired to fill newly created positions in organizations

• Employees are hired to replace individuals who have left the organization

Four Steps to Employee Selection

• Planning the need for new employees

• Getting appropriate persons to apply for positions (recruitment)

• Deciding whom to hire (selection)

• Getting the selected people to take jobs

Planning Acquiring Applicants

Selecting Applicants Hiring

Diagram of Acquiring New Employees

Planning Of Human Resource Needs

• To Maintain the livelihood of an organization, it must have a steady supply of human resources, or people.

• To do a good job of recruiting the people needed by an organization, careful planning is necessary

Recruiting Applicants

• Organizations need to be able hire qualified people. In order to fulfill this requirement there must be a large number of job applicants to choose from.

Six Possible Sources Of Applicants

• Advertising (newspapers, fliers, etc.)

• Employee Referral

• Employment Agencies (Unemployment Offices)

• School Recruiters (Job fairs)

• Walk-ins• Web (Monster.

com)

Issues with Recruitment

• Different sources of job applicants do not necessarily attract the same quality of applicants.

• According to Zottoli and Wanous (2000) reviewed 50 years of research on applicant sources and found consistent evidence that inside sources, employee referrals of acquaintances or friends, rehires or those who had previously worked at the organization and transfers from inside the organization provided employees who performed better and remained on the job longer on average than outside sources.

How do Organizations Select Employees?

• Most often used approach, manager interviews the applicant and decides subjectively whom to hire.

• Purely subjective hiring procedures are likely to be biased and inaccurate.

Important Elements in Employee Selection

• Employers must know what the criterion is for the job in question.

• The second element is the predictor, which is anything that relates to the criterion.

• The previous techniques can be used to assess KSAOs

Validation Studies

• Validation studies are research studies that attempt to show that the predictor relates to the criterion.

• Both the criterion and predictor are qualified.• Data is collected for a group of employees on

both variables.• The correlation coefficient indicates how well

the two variables relate to each other. If the two variables are significantly related, it can be concluded that the predictor is valid in terms of the criterion.

Conduction a Validation Study

• Conducting a validation study involves five steps:

1. Conduct a job analysis

2. Specify job performance criteria

3. Choose predictors

4. Validate the predictors

5. Cross-validate

Conducting a Job Analysis

• Provides information about the tasks involved in a job

• Also provides information about the KSAOs needed to do the job successfully

Specifying Job Performance Criteria

• Once an employer has a good idea about what a job entails, criteria for good job performance can be developed.

Choose Predictors

• As an organization develops criteria for a job, it also chooses potential predictors of job performance on those criteria.

Validate the Predictors • Measures of the criterion and the predictors are taken

on a sample of people to see whether the predictor relates to the criterion.

• By conducting field studies in the settings in which selection tools will ultimately be used, the likelihood of generalization is maximized.

• There are 2 types of study designs.• Concurrent validation and predictive validity studies.• Concurrent validation both the criterion and predictor

scores are collected from a sample of participants at more or less the same point in time.

• Predictive validity, the predictors are measured before the criterion.

Cross-Validation

• The final step in a validation study is to cross-validate, or replicate the results of one sample with those of another sample.

• 2 samples are needed to conduct a cross-validation. The first sample is used to determine whether the criterion and the predictor are significantly correlated. A second sample is used to see whether the significant found in the first sample can be repeated on the second.

Validity Generalization

• Validity generalization means that validities of selection devices are generalizable or transportable from job to job and organization to organization.

How Predictor Information is Used for Selection

• Multiple Hurdles: approach sets a criterion for each predictor. If an applicant achieves that criterion, then the hurdle is passed. It is efficient to use multiple hurdles in a specified order and eliminate applicants as the assessment process goes from hurdle to hurdle.

• Regression Approach: this approach uses the score from each predictor in an equation to provide a numerical estimate of the criterion.

Alternatives to Conducting Validation Studies

• An alternative approach is to rely on the established validity of selection tools that can be linked to KSAO requirements.

Getting Applicants to Accept Job Offers and Keep Jobs

• Ensure that salaries are comparable to those of other organizations for similar jobs in the same area.

• Negotiate salary and other rewards with the potential employee.

• Cafeteria benefits allow employees to pick and choose benefits from a long list of possibilities, such as different types of insurance policies, stocks and bonds.

• Care must be taken to present conditions at the work honestly and accuraretly.

Realistic Job Preview (RJP)

• Used to give job applicants accurate information about the job and the organization. It is most typically accomplished with a brochure or videotaped presentation.

• A good RJP provides an accurate view of both favorable and unfavorable aspects of a job, so that a person who accepts a job will do so with accurate and realistic expections.

How Valid Selection Devices Work

• Utility analysis: The analysis of the financial benefits to an organization of taking a course of action.

• Three basic concepts form the foundation of utility analysis

Base rateSelection ratioValidity

• Baserate: is the percentage of applicants who would be successful on the job if all of them were hired.

• Selection Ration: the proportion of job applicants that an organization must hire. It is calculated as the number of positions to fill divided by the number of applicants

• Validity: The validity of a selection device is the magnitude of correlation between it and the criterion. The correlation, the more accurately the criterion can be forecast by selection device.

Legal Issues

• Prior to 1964 in the United States, discrimination against ethnic minorities and women was widespread for many jobs, particularly for the most desirable and highest-paying ones.

• The Civil Rights Act of 1964 made it illegal to discriminate against minorities and other areas of life in U.S. society.

Protected Classes

• Comprise of persons who have been the target of discrimination in the past, namely African-Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans, and women.