Personnel selection
Personnel selection is the process used to hire (or, less commonly, promote) individuals. Although the term can apply to all aspects of the process (recruitment, selection, hiring, acculturation, etc.) the most common meaning focuses on the selection of workers.
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[edit] Overview
The professional standards of industrial psychologists require that any selection system be based on a job analysis to ensure that the selection criteria are job-related. The requirements for a selection system are knowledge, skills, ability, and other characteristics, known as KSAO's. U.S. law also recognizes bona fide occupational qualifications (BFOQs), which are requirements for a job which would be discriminatory were they not necessary—such as only employing men as wardens of maximum-security male prisons, or enforcing a mandatory retirement age for airline pilots, or a religious college only employing professors of its religion to teach its theology.
The goal of personnel selection, as all business processes, is to ensure an adequate return on investment. In the case of selection, this entails assurances that the productivity of the new hires produce more value than the costs of recruiting, selecting, and training them. Within industrial psychology, the area of utility analysis specifically addresses this issue.
Several screening methods exist that may be used in personnel selection. Examples include the use of minimum or desired qualifications, resume/application review, scored biodata instruments, oral interviews, work performance measures (e.g., writing samples), and tests[disambiguation needed 
] (cognitive ability, personality, job knowledge). Development and implementation of such screening methods is sometimes done by human resources departments; larger organizations hire consultants or firms that specialize in developing personnel selection systems.
[edit] History and development
Selection into organizations has as ancient a history as organizations themselves. Chinese civil servant exams, which were established in 605, may be the first documented, modern selection tests. As a scientific and scholarly field, personnel selection owes much to psychometric theory and the art of integrating selection systems falls to human resource professionals.
Much of the US research on selection is conducted by members of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP). Primary research topics include:
- The practicality, reliability, validity, and utility of various forms of selection measures
- Methods for demonstrating return on investment for selection systems
- Assessing fairness and making selection systems as fair as possible
- Legal issues—such as disparate treatment and disparate impact—and overall compliance with laws
- The generalizability of validity across different work contexts
- Alternative methods of demonstrating validity, such as synthetic validity[1]
- The predictive validity of non-traditional measures, such as personality
[edit] Predicting job performance
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A meta-analysis of selection methods in personnel psychology found that general mental ability was the best overall predictor of job performance and training performance.[2]
[edit] See also
[edit] Notes
- ^ Steel, Piers; Allen I. Huffcutt, John Kammeyer-Mueller (2006). "From the Work One Knows the Worker: A Systematic Review of the Challenges, Solutions, and Steps to Creating Synthetic Validity". International Journal of Selection and Assessment 14 (1): 16–36. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=889965.
- ^ Schmidt, Frank L.; Hunter, John E. (1998). The validity and utility of selection methods in personnel psychology: Practical and theoretical implications of 85 years of research findings. Psychological Bulletin, Vol 124(2), Sep 1998, 262-274.
