Employee Testing & Selection

1. - Employee Testing & selection

6. Copyright © 2011 Pearson
Education
6–6
Why Careful Selection is Important
Organizational
performance
Costs of recruiting
and hiring
The Importance of Selecting
the Right Employees
Legal obligations
and liability

7. - Employee Testing & selection
• Once the employers select the most qualified
candidates from the pool of applicants, they
will need to sort through them to decide who
the best of those qualified people may be.
• Employee testing and selection help to give
employers the best picture of each applicant
to help make a decision.

8. Copyright © 2011 Pearson
Education
6–8
Avoiding Negligent Hiring Claims
• Carefully scrutinize information on employment
applications.
• Get written authorization for reference checks, and
check references.
• Save all records and information about the applicant.
• Reject applicants for false statements or conviction
records for offenses related to the job.
• Balance the applicant’s privacy rights with others’
“need to know.”
• Take immediate disciplinary action if problems arise.

9. Copyright © 2011 Pearson
Education
6–9
Basic Testing Concepts
• Reliability
– Describes the consistency of scores obtained by
the same person when retested with the identical
or alternate forms of the same test.
– Are test results stable over time?
• Validity
– Indicates whether a test is measuring what it is
supposed to be measuring.
– Does the test actually measure what it is intended
to measure?

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Education
6–10
Types of Validity
Criterion validity Content validity
Types of
Test Validity

11. • First, content validity, measures whether the
test covers all the content it needs to provide
the outcome you’re expecting.
• criterion validity is when you compare your
results to what you’re supposed to get based
on a chosen criteria.
• There are two ways these could be measured,
predictive or concurrent validity.

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Types of Validity
• Criterion validity
– A type of validity based on showing that scores on the
test (predictors) are related to job performance
(criterion).
• Are test scores in this class related to students’ knowledge of
human resource management?
• Content validity
– A test that is content valid is one that contains a fair
sample of the tasks and skills actually needed for the
job in question.
• Do the test questions in this course relate to human
resource management topics?
• Is taking an HR course the same as doing HR?

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6–13
How to Validate a Test (cont’d)
• Step 4: Relate Test Scores and Criteria
– Correlation analysis
• Actual scores on the test with actual performance
• Step 5: Cross-Validate and Revalidate
– Repeat Step 3 and Step 4 with a different sample
of employees.

15. Aptitude Tests
• Intelligence Tests
• Mechanical Aptitude Tests
• Psychomotor Tests
• Clerical Aptitude Tests

18. Achievement Tests
• Job Knowledge Tests
• Work Sample Tests

19. Situational Tests
• Group Discussion
• In-Basket

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Education
6–20
Types of Tests
Cognitive
abilities
Motor and
physical abilities
Personality
and interests
What Different Tests Measure
Current
achievement

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rights reserved.
6–21
Types of Tests
• Tests of cognitive abilities
– Intelligence Tests
• Tests of general intellectual abilities that measure a
range of abilities, including memory, vocabulary, verbal
fluency, and numerical ability.
– Aptitude tests
• Tests that measure specific mental abilities, such as
inductive and deductive reasoning, verbal
comprehension, memory, and numerical ability.

22. Interest Tests
•
Interest tests are inventories of all likes and
dislikes of the candidates about their work,
occupation, hobbies, and other spare time
activities.
The main objective of this test is to identify
the candidate’s interest or disinterest in the
job offered to him and to determine the
specific areas in which the candidate is
showing interest.

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Types of Tests (cont’d)
• Tests of motor abilities
– Tests that measure motor abilities, such as finger
dexterity, manual dexterity, and reaction time.
• Tests of physical abilities
– Tests that measure static strength, dynamic
strength, body coordination, and stamina.

24. © 2005 Prentice Hall Inc. All
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Measuring Personality and Interests
• Personality tests
– Tests that use projective techniques and trait
inventories to measure basic aspects of an applicant’s
personality, such as introversion, stability, and
motivation.
– Disadvantage
• Personality tests—particularly the projective type—are the
most difficult tests to evaluate and use.
– Advantage
• Tests have been used successfully to predict dysfunctional
job behaviors and identify successful candidates for overseas
assignments.

25. Copyright © 2011 Pearson
Education
6–25
Background Investigations and
Other Selection Methods
• Investigations and Checks
– Reference checks
– Background employment checks
– Criminal records
– Driving records
– Credit checks
• Why?
– To verify factual information provided by applicants
– To uncover damaging information

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Education
6–26
Background Investigations and
Reference Checks
Former Employers
Current Supervisors
Written References
Social Networking Sites
Commercial Credit
Rating Companies
Sources of
Information

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Education
6–27
Limitations on Background
Investigations and Reference Checks
Background
Investigations and
Reference Checks
Supervisor
Reluctance
Employer
Guidelines
Legal Issues:
Privacy
Legal Issues:
Defamation

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Education
6–28
Making Background Checks More
Useful
1. Include on the application form a statement for
applicants to sign explicitly authorizing a background
check.
2. Use telephone references if possible.
3. Be persistent in obtaining information.
4. Compare the submitted résumé to the application.
5. Ask open-ended questions to elicit more information
from references.
6. Use references provided by the candidate as a source
for other references.

29. Copyright © 2011 Pearson
Education
6–29
Physical Examinations
• Reasons for preemployment medical
examinations:
– To verify that the applicant meets the physical
requirements of the position.
– To discover any medical limitations to be taken into
account in placing the applicant.
– To establish a record and baseline of the applicant’s
health for future insurance or compensation claims.
– To reduce absenteeism and accidents.
– To detect communicable diseases that may be
unknown to the applicant.