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Competency-based selection (also known as behavioral selection) is a well-known selection method about which many books have been written, and many training courses delivered. Despite this, in my conversations with other in-house recruitment teams, it has surprised me how few companies apply the technique as part of their recruitment methodology.

I therefore thought that it might be helpful if I provided an overview of the concepts and logic behind this system. Whether or not you choose to actually apply the process, I certainly think it should be given consideration first. keep reading…

It has been an interesting week as I have watched issues that I deal with on a daily basis become part of the mainstream news media. For those of you who are unaware, earlier this week the Supreme Court handed down a ruling in a case that deals with discrimination and employment testing. This case is highly relevant to what myself and other I/O psychologists do, and its complexities do not surprise me at all. I cut my teeth as a psychometrician for the City of New Orleans, helping to create and validate police and firefighter testing. I can say with confidence that, when it comes to test development and validation, public service testing carries with it by far the most potential for litigation. There are many reasons for this, all of which seem to hinge on the promotion (or lack thereof) of those in a protected class (e.g., minorities) over those in non-protected classes.

A complete discussion of the intricacies and technicalities of validation, discrimination, adverse impact, and differential prediction is beyond the scope of the words I am writing today. Suffice it to say that this case has placed competing priorities in the use of testing in the spotlight. These competing priorities are using fair testing while striving to eliminate discrimination in hiring. While title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 has attempted to provide some guidance in relation to these competing goals, the Ricci case has laid bare some critical issues that in my opinion certainly call for the government to re-evaluate and modernize the standards it has set.

We are mandated to use valid tests. Valid tests can often lead to minorities being hired at lower rates than those of other races. This is seen as OK as long as the test has been validated, because in theory this means the test is job-related and job-relatedness is the standard by which the legality of testing is determined.

However, what are we to do when sticking to the use of validation — as we have been asked to do — creates a situation that actually inhibits the goal of ensuring diversity and fairness? This has been a thorny issue for those of us in my profession for a long time. There is no magic bullet. The dissenting opinion in this case led by Justice Ginsburg rallies around the idea that the spirit of diversity and fairness should be the highest standard to which we aspire in hiring. It is hard to argue with this point … except for the fact that there are technical issues which can stand in the way of our achievement of this goal.

So, what does all this mean for hiring in the corporate world? I offer my humble answer to this question as follows: keep reading…

The U.S. Supreme Court today gave employers some guidance today on the use of assessment tests, saying the results of these tests can not be ignored simply because they have an adverse impact on a protected group.

Ruling 5-4 in the case of Ricci v. DeStefano, the court’s majority said just because a disproportionate share of whites pass a test does not make the test discriminatory. Writing for the majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy said invalidating test results because of the statistical racial outcome, “… is impermissible under Title VII unless the employer can demonstrate a strong basis in evidence that, had it not taken the action, it would have been liable under the disparate-impact statute.”

Now, before an employer looking at the racial makeup of those who passed and failed a promotional exam and, almost certainly, other types of employment exams, can decide to throw out the results because it fears a discrimination lawsuit, it must have “a strong basis in evidence” to believe the test is discriminatory under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and its amendments.

Employment lawyers reacted with caution, saying the 92-page decision, including a dissent by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, will take time to digest. Their initial impression, however, is that the court appears to have tempered if not invalidated the 80 percent rule of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. That rule states that the selection of a group at less than 80 percent of the group with the highest rate will be considered by the EEOC as evidence of discrimination.

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We are approaching the 40th anniversary of the historic Apollo 11 mission in which the world witnessed the first human to walk on the moon. This event was an historic moment for mankind and one that will live on as one of the most triumphant moments for the human race. keep reading…

What makes a good candidate different from a bad one? What defines a high quality candidate? I can’t count the conversations I have had with recruiters on these questions, and few have had answers.

For as long as I can remember, recruiters have focused on cost as the primary measure of their effectiveness and value to the organization. The most popular recruiting metric has been cost-per-hire, and recruiting functions justify their existence by showing how much less expensive they are than an outsourced solution.

This, however, has begun to change. keep reading…

Sometime this month, perhaps even today, the U.S. Supreme Court will hand down a ruling with potentially far-reaching implications for employers.

So much has been reported and written about the case of Ricci v. DeStafano that it’s almost impossible to have missed the story of how 20 New Haven, Conn. firefighters were denied  promotions although they came out on top in civil service tests for lieutenant and captain. Eighteen of the top scorers were white; two Latino. None were black, although the city is 37 percent black and blacks made up 30 percent of the fire department in 2003, when the test was given.

When the city’s Civil Service Board got the results, it feared certifying the test would expose the city to a Civil Rights lawsuit on the basis that the test had a disparate impact on a protected minority. But not certifying the results meant an almost certain lawsuit from the successful candidates who might claim, as they later did, that they had been discriminated against based on their race. A part of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 makes it illegal to “alter the results of, employment related tests on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.“

The Morton’s Fork faced by the board was underscored by its 2-2 vote on certification, an outcome that meant the test results were not certified. keep reading…

Every year thousands of industrial-organizational psychologists gather for our society’s annual conference. This conference always proves to be an interesting and fun event chocked full of useful information. Readers who are unfamiliar with SIOP should definitely check it out. While much of the conference is highly academic, there is probably no other place where one can learn more about the actual implementation and measurement of assessment tools.

One of the most exciting things for me at this year’s conference was the launch of SIOP’s new blog/interactive community site, the SIOP Exchange.

I was part of a team that created this blog in order to help promote I-O psychology and build an increased sense of community amongst SIOP members and other interested parties. I encourage those folks in the ERE community who are interested in the viewpoint of I-Os on topics related to our work to check it out. The Exchange offers RSS feeds that will help keep you aware of topics that may be of interest to you.

In addition to launching the blog, this year I participated in several panels in which assessment solution providers and the end users of assessments discussed important issues related to technology and testing. It is rare to such varied experience and expertise in the use of assessment in one place. I want to share some of the hot topics with ERE readers to help keep the ERE community updated on how testing and assessment experts are handling important issues that impact the use of technology based testing. Here is a quick rundown of some of the themes that were represented. keep reading…

Those of you who have kept up with my writings over the years know that I firmly believe that simulations are the future of pre-employment assessment. Over the years I have dedicated a good deal of thought and practice to understanding how technology can be used to begin creating the next generation of simulation tools.

The purpose of this article is not to provide a detailed outline of the virtues of simulations (please refer to some of my earlier writings for this type of information). Beyond this, the crux of the issue is that simulations offer some really nice advantages over simple employment tests. These advantages include:

• A high degree of candidate engagement. Simulations are more fun and engaging then simply filling in radio buttons.
• A high degree of accuracy. Since simulations are miniature replicas of the job for which a person is applying, scores on simulations are likely to be strongly correlated with actual job performance.
• A realistic job preview. Simulations provide candidates with the opportunity to try out the job in question and allow applicants who do not feel the work is for them to remove themselves from consideration saving time and money.
• An employment branding tool. Fun and engaging hiring practices can really help reinforce an employment brand. Considering the trend in gaming and computer simulated environments, this may offer a competitive advantage when it comes to the coming generations of job seekers.
• Reduced bias. Simulations offer a way to help reduce bias and subjectivity in the hiring process due to their realism.

In order to better understand the future of job simulations for selecting employees, let’s take a quick look at the past and present state of affairs.

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Employment tests may not be perfect, but one new study suggests they’re no more racist than we humans. I wonder what Charles, Wendell, and ERE members who are interested in assessments have to say. Leave a comment here if you have thoughts. keep reading…

People are always writing articles about the best interview questions. One author (who positioned himself as a hiring expert) actually advised, “In terms of ‘canned’ interview questions, my suggestion is to select a few questions you like and ask them.”

This is a fine strategy for making friends, but absolute nonsense for a recruiter (I had another word in mind, but it would have been politically incorrect.)

After some initial chit-chat, the only interview questions a recruiter or hiring manager should ask are ones that provide trustworthy and reliable data about whether the candidate has the skills for the job.

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To most people, the Super Bowl is a fun event to watch. However, because the game is highly competitive and because only the very best teams make it to the event, there are some critical lessons that corporate managers and recruiters can learn from competitive sports and the Super Bowl:

Lesson #1 -“Minor colleges” produce some of the best players on Super Bowl teams.

It’s clear from examining the player rosters that most Super Bowl players don’t come from powerhouse football colleges. Some examples include:

• The Star Players. The four most notable star players in the game all come from non-football powers. For Arizona, star quarterback Kurt Warner came from Northern Iowa - Burlington and star wide receiver Larry Fitzgerald came from the University of Pittsburgh. For Pittsburgh, starting quarterback Ben Rothlisberger came from Miami of Ohio and running back Willie Parker came from North Carolina. Not a single one of these players former university teams made it into the Associated Press Top 25 rankings this year.
• The Remaining Players. Of the 112 active players on the final rosters of the combined teams, only four came from this year’s top college teams that are perennial powerhouses (i.e. Florida, Oklahoma, and USC).
• The Arizona Cardinals roster successfully recruited players from non-powerhouse teams like Louisiana-Lafayette, Kansas State, Richmond, Northern Iowa, Hawaii, Brown, Delaware, Fresno State, Tennessee State, Trinity University, UC Davis, Northern Iowa, and of course, Clarion!
• The world champion Pittsburgh Steelers roster includes players from such non-powerhouse university teams like Hofstra, Clemson, Kent State, Marshall, Tulane, Southern Mississippi, TCU, Northern Colorado, Syracuse, Rutgers, Indiana (of Pa.), La.-Lafayette, and perennial powerhouse…Tiffin.

Lesson #2 –“Experience” isn’t required to become a Super Bowl head coach.

At least this year, previous experience as a successful head coach isn’t a requirement for getting your team to the Super Bowl.

The best head coaches aren’t always the most experienced. You can’t say the coaches of either team this year are experienced, veteran head coaches. Neither has been a head coach at a Super Bowl before. Both would have to be considered as “inexperienced” head coaches (both are only in their second year of being a head coach anywhere in the NFL), and both are relatively young.

Mike Tomlin of Pittsburgh, the NFL Coach of the year, is only 36 years old (the youngest Super Bowl coach ever) and Arizona’s Ken Whisenhunt is only 44.

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Last week the Wall Street Journal ran a very interesting article: “Test for Dwindling Retail Jobs Spawns a Culture of Cheating.”

This well-written and researched piece is somewhat groundbreaking in that it is the first article in a mainstream media outlet to provide evidence of cheating on employment tests. Those of us in the testing industry have always been concerned with the security of our tests and have taken a variety of precautions to defend against it, but this is the first time I have ever read actual evidence that documents the existing of cheating.

As a testing expert and someone who has a high degree of familiarity with Unicru/Kronos (the company whose tests are the subject of the piece), I figured it would make sense for me to weigh in on this important article. Here are some thoughts about the article and the issues it raises:

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A year ago it was business as usual for most of us in the staffing industry. My how things change! Of course the big news for 2009 is the economy. This coming year is going to force all of us to start getting creative and perhaps re-think the way we do things in order to accomplish our goals with fewer resources. But what, if anything, do these changes mean for the world of pre-employment assessment?

The most significant change I expect to see in pre-employment assessments in 2009 is a slowing of uptake as some organizations slow their hiring to a trickle or cut things seen as non-essential (i.e., assessment) from their budgets. I am not going to miss the opportunity to suggest that cuts to the budget for assessment are unwarranted because a well-designed assessment program can provide ROI — no matter what the economic context may be. My thoughts about a slight slowdown in the use of assessment are just speculation; it will be interesting to see if hard data such as that provided by our 6th Annual Screening and Assessment Usage Survey supports this speculation. If you have not taken the survey yet, I encourage you to do so. It only takes about 10 minutes and the information you provide is very valuable.

Despite the possibility of a slowdown in the purchase of assessments, there are a number of trends, nine in all, that will help mark 2009.

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Two years after I visited with Israel’s recruiting-related and other companies, the country some call America’s 51st state has slowed along with the rest of the world. Says Sandy Erez, of assessment vendor HRVision, “The worldwide recession has not spared the Israeli economy from its devastating effects. Every day, companies are laying off tens and hundreds of people.”

Meanwhile, the three companies I mentioned in greatest detail on that trip — Redmatch, CareerHarmony, and HRVision, are still kicking.

keep reading…

This article has been updated with a corrected link to the survey at the end.

by Dr. Charles Handler and Mark C. Healy, M.A.

We I/O psychologist-types tend to be real data hounds. Much of the work we do for our employers/clients involves the use of data to investigate specific hypotheses in order to illuminate the underlying truth in a situation. The outcome of this work often has tremendous value to organizations because it provides them with hard data on which strategic decisions can be based. Additionally, the collection and analyses of data often helps us to identify new trends that we haven’t yet thought about.

Many of you who follow our articles know that we have a keen interest in the pre-employment assessment industry, and write quite a bit about its trends and happenings within. Our interest in data and trends has led to an annual online screening and assessment usage survey.

The idea for this survey was born back in 2002, when we became frustrated over the lack of available information about the usage of pre-employment screening and assessment tools. This lack of information has been a challenge because though everyone seems to be saying that screening is becoming a hot area, there’s little actual data available to confirm this statement or to tell us how hot it really is. This lack of information also makes it hard for those of us who follow this industry closely to provide factual information about how companies are using online screening and assessment tools, and what the results of this usage have been. This year we have made a few changes to the survey questions to help us be sure we are staying up to date with some of the major trends and issues that pertain to assessment and the manner in which it is integrated into the hiring process.

At the end of this article, you’ll find a link to this year’s survey. Take a few minutes to help other members of our community by providing information about your company’s screening and assessment practices. The more data that’s collected, the clearer existing and emerging trends will become. Last year, we had a record number of responses, a fact that seems to indicate the increased interest level in screening and assessment. Given the steady increase in interest and the lack of information about this industry, we feel the results will continue to have value for the ERE community. We look forward to reporting our findings right here on ERE sometime this coming Spring.

In order to provide some extra motivation, here’s a quick summary of the trends identified in last year’s results.

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What test instrument can quickly assess a candidate’s personality preferences; is cheap; available to almost everyone; marketed by dozens of vendors under a variety of names; and, is recommended “unreliable and untrustworthy” by most testing professionals? Yes, there are others, but I was referring to the DISC.

(Although this article focused on the DISC, you could apply its comments to any test, assessment, interview, exercise, role-play, and so forth used to separate qualified from unqualified applicants.)

Some Background

DISC development began in the early 1900s when the Army asked psychologist William Marston to investigate why different soldiers who received the same training behaved differently. He published a report about 10 years later entitled “Emotions of Normal People.”

As far as we know, Marston’s objective was to describe “mental energy”… not assess and classify people for a job. Shortly afterward, another psychologist used Marston’s theory to develop a pencil-and-paper test. It asked people to choose between pairs of adjectives (i.e., which adjective is most like you and which adjective is least like you); then it added items together and reported scores for dominance, extraversion, need for security, and need for structure. (Remember that Marston was NOT trying to hire the most qualified people for a job — just explain normal behavior.)

So far, so good.

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Many execs put industry experience at the top of their criteria list for sales-management candidates.

“The successful applicant will have 10 years experience in the widget industry.”

Hogwash!

The end result of this approach is that companies hire the industry retreads.

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It’s easy to demonstrate the impact of pre-employment assessments when there are a large number of candidates available. In such situations, there is a strong need to use some sort of filter to help quickly eliminate unqualified applicants (screening out) and to collect more in-depth information about those who are qualified (screening in). Assessment is the perfect way to help support automated screening and to equip hiring personnel with the information they need to support decision-making.

But many folks predict that it’ll be increasingly harder to find qualified applicants to fill job openings, especially when it comes to white collar, managerial, and professional-level jobs. We have all dealt with numerous situations where the age-old “mirror test” (hiring anyone who is breathing and thus has the ability to fog a mirror) is the only thing required to fill a position. In such cases, it’s harder to make an argument for using something that will actually serve to further reduce the number of applicants to be considered.

Assessment can have value even when one has few applicants to chose from or even when there is a shortage of qualified applicants. Below are five good reasons why it still makes sense to use assessment, no matter what the labor market looks like.

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If you’re into brown, blue and green you ought to go be a doctor or a forest ranger. See how easy picking a career is when you know your colors?

Like white? Then interior decorating is for you. (Too easy. Everyone knows white goes with everything.)

How about if your favorite colors happen to be black and red and orange? Maybe you just really like Halloween. Otherwise, you are “The Evaluator,” says a press release from CareerBuilder (profile; site), which just added a color wheel (parked on the old CareerPath.com website) to help jobseekers better assess their personality.

Before we get scolded for making light of a serious assessment tool let us note that the Color Career Counselor has been scientifically vetted with the results published in the North American Journal of Psychology. You can read the paper here, but fair warning: it’s full of the kind of statistical analysis we avoided in college.

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Back in 2006 I wrote an article discussing the integration of assessments into job boards. It was an example of the continued movement toward the inclusion of assessments into the mainstream of recruiting and hiring products and systems.

In this article, I praised the progress being made in understanding the value of quality assessment products in the modern hiring process.

I strongly believe that the words I wrote in 2006 are as relevant today as they ever were; in fact, they are more relevant now than ever. The days of the big job boards and their keyword matching strategies are numbered.

keep reading…