A-2 How do personnel psychologists help organizations with employee selection, work placement, and performance appraisal?

Psychologists can assist organizations at various stages of selecting and assessing employees. They may help identify needed job skills, decide upon selection methods, recruit and evaluate applicants, introduce and train new employees, and appraise their performance.

“So what interests you?” we may ask a new acquaintance. When faculty advisers or vocational counselors probe further, we may ask: “What do you love to do? What are you doing when time just flies—and what are you doing when time seems to stand still?” By exploring what someone enjoys, we seek to discern what academic and vocational pursuits might fit the student’s interests. Much work is hard or tedious labor that people do solely for self-support. But the best job is one that pays you to do what you love—be it doing things with your hands, thinking of solutions, expressing yourself creatively, assisting people, being in charge, or working with data. Do what you love and you will love what you do.

A career counseling science aims, first, to assess people’s differing values, personalities, and, especially, interests, which are remarkably stable (Dik & Rottinghaus, 2013). (Your job may change, but your interests today will likely still be your interests in 10 years.) Second, it aims to alert people to well-matched vocations—vocations with a good person-environment fit. One study assessed 400,000 high school students’ interests and then followed them over time. The take-home finding: “Interests uniquely predict academic and career success over and above cognitive ability and personality” (Rounds & Su, 2014). The power of well-matched interests to predict income, for example, “greatly exceeded the contributions of ability and personality.” Sixty other studies confirm the point both for students in school and workers on the job: Interests predict both performance and persistence (Nye et al., 2012).

Harnessing Strengths

As a new AT&T human resources executive, psychologist Mary Tenopyr (1997) was assigned to solve a problem: Customer-service representatives were failing at a high rate. After concluding that many of the hires were ill-matched to the demands of their new job, Tenopyr developed a new selection instrument:

The happy result of her data-driven work was a new test that enabled AT&T to identify likely-to-succeed representatives. Personnel selection techniques such as this one aim to match people’s strengths with work that enables them and their organization to flourish. Marry the strengths of people with the tasks of organizations and the result is often prosperity and profit.

Your strengths are any enduring qualities that can be productively applied. Are you naturally curious? Persuasive? Charming? Persistent? Competitive? Analytical? Empathic? Organized? Articulate? Neat? Mechanical? Any such trait, if matched with suitable work, can function as a strength (Buckingham, 2007).

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Gallup researchers Marcus Buckingham and Donald Clifton (2001) have argued that the first step to a stronger organization is instituting a strengths-based selection system. Thus, as a manager, you would first identify a group of the most effective people in any role—the ones you would want to hire more of—and compare their strengths with those of a group of the least effective people in that role. In defining these groups, you would try to measure performance as objectively as possible. In one Gallup study of more than 5000 telecommunications customer-service representatives, those evaluated most favorably by their managers were strong in “harmony” and “responsibility,” while those actually rated most effective by customers were strong in energy, assertiveness, and eagerness to learn.

An example: If you needed to hire new people in software development, and you had discovered that your best software developers are analytical, disciplined, and eager to learn, you would focus employment ads less on experience than on the identified strengths. Thus “Do you take a logical and systematic approach to problem solving [analytical]? Are you a perfectionist who strives for timely completion of your projects [disciplined]? Do you want to master Java, C++, and PHP [eager to learn]? If you can say Yes to these questions, then please call …”

Identifying people’s strengths and matching those strengths to work is a first step toward workplace effectiveness. To assess applicants’ strengths and decide who is best suited to the job, personnel managers use various tools (Sackett & Lievens, 2008), including ability tests, personality tests, and behavioral observations in “assessment centers” that test applicants on tasks that mimic the job they seek.

Discovering Your Strengths

You can use some of the techniques personnel psychologists have developed to identify your own strengths and pinpoint types of work that will likely prove satisfying and successful. Buckingham and Clifton (2001) have suggested asking yourself these questions:

Some people find themselves in flow—their skills engaged and time flying—when teaching or selling or writing or cleaning or consoling or creating or repairing. If an activity feels good, if it comes easily, if you look forward to it, then look deeper and see your strengths at work. For a free (requires registration) assessment of your personal strengths, visit www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu and select the “Brief Strengths Test.”

The U.S. Department of Labor also offers a vocational interest questionnaire via its Occupational Information Network (O*NET). At www.mynextmove.org/explore/ip you will need about 10 minutes to respond to 60 items, indicating how much you would like or dislike activities ranging from building kitchen cabinets to playing a musical instrument. You will then receive feedback on how strongly your responses reflect six interest types specified by vocational psychologist John L. Holland (1996): realistic (hands-on doers), investigative (thinkers), artistic (creators), social (helpers, teachers), enterprising (persuaders, deciders), and conventional (organizers). Finally, depending on how much training you indicate being willing to undertake, you will be shown occupations—selected from a national database of 900+ occupations—that are congruent with your interest pattern. A more comprehensive (and fee-based) online service (called VIP) assesses people’s values, interests, and personalities; suggests occupations; and connects people to job listings at www.jobzology.com.

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Satisfied and successful people devote far less time to correcting their deficiencies than to accentuating their strengths. Top performers are “rarely well rounded,” Buckingham and Clifton found (p. 26). Instead, they have sharpened their existing skills. Given the persistence of our traits and temperaments, we should focus not on our deficiencies, but rather on identifying and employing our talents. There may be limits to the benefits of assertiveness training if you are extremely shy, of public speaking courses if you tend to be nervous and soft-spoken, or of drawing classes if you express your artistic side in stick figures.

Identifying your talents can help you recognize the activities you learn quickly and find absorbing. Knowing your strengths, you can develop them further.

Most interviewers feel confident of their ability to predict long-term job performance from a get-acquainted interview. What’s therefore shocking is how error prone interviewers’ predictions are when predicting job or graduate school success. From their review of 85 years of personnel-selection research, I/O psychologists Frank Schmidt and John Hunter (1998; Schmidt, 2002) determined that for all but less-skilled jobs, general mental ability best predicts on-the-job performance. Subjective overall evaluations from informal interviews are more useful than handwriting analysis (which is worthless). But informal interviews are less informative than aptitude tests, work samples, job knowledge tests, and past job performance. If there’s a contest between what our gut tells us about someone and what test scores, work samples, and past performance tell us, we should distrust our gut (Highhouse, 2008).

Unstructured Interviews and the Interviewer Illusion

Traditional unstructured interviews can provide a sense of someone’s personality—their expressiveness, warmth, and verbal ability, for example. But these informal interviews also give interviewees considerable power to control the impression they are making in the interview situation (Barrick et al., 2009). Why, then, do many interviewers have such faith in their ability to discern interviewee’s fitness for a job? “I have excellent interviewing skills, so I don’t need reference checking as much as someone who doesn’t have my ability to read people,” I/O consultants often hear. This tendency to overrate their ability to predict people’s futures is called the interviewer illusion (Dana et al., 2013; Nisbett, 1987). Five factors explain the gap between interviewers’ overconfidence and the resulting reality:

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Hoping to improve prediction and selection, personnel psychologists have put people in simulated work situations, sought information on past performance, aggregated evaluations from multiple interviews, administered tests, and developed job-specific interviews.

Structured Interviews

Unlike casual conversation aimed at getting a feel for someone, structured interviews offer a disciplined method of collecting information. A personnel psychologist may analyze a job, script questions, and train interviewers. The interviewers then put the same questions, in the same order, to all applicants, and rate each applicant on established scales.

In an unstructured interview, someone might ask, “How organized are you?” “How well do you get along with people?” or “How do you handle stress?” Street-smart applicants know how to score high: “Although I sometimes drive myself too hard, I handle stress by prioritizing and delegating, and by making sure I leave time for sleep and exercise.”

By contrast, structured interviews pinpoint strengths (attitudes, behaviors, knowledge, and skills) that distinguish high performers in a particular line of work. The process includes outlining job-specific situations and asking candidates to explain how they would handle them, and how they handled similar situations in their prior employment. “Tell me about a time when you were caught between conflicting demands, without time to accomplish both. How did you handle that?”

To reduce memory distortions and bias, the interviewer takes notes and makes ratings as the interview proceeds and avoids irrelevant and follow-up questions. The structured interview therefore feels less warm, but that can be explained to the applicant: “This conversation won’t typify how we relate to each other in this organization.”

A review of 150 findings revealed that structured interviews had double the predictive accuracy of unstructured seat-of-the-pants interviews (Schmidt & Hunter, 1998; Wiesner & Cronshaw, 1988). Structured interviews also reduce bias, such as against overweight applicants (Kutcher & Bragger, 2004). Thanks partly to its greater reliability and partly to its job-analysis focus, the predictive power of one structured interview is roughly equal to that of the average judgment from three or four unstructured interviews (Huffcutt et al., 2001; Schmidt & Zimmerman, 2004).

If, instead, we let our intuitions bias the hiring process, noted Malcolm Gladwell (2000, p. 86), then “all we will have done is replace the old-boy network, where you hired your nephew, with the new-boy network, where you hire whoever impressed you most when you shook his hand. Social progress, unless we’re careful, can merely be the means by which we replace the obviously arbitrary with the not so obviously arbitrary.”

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To recap, personnel psychologists assist organizations in analyzing jobs, recruiting well-suited applicants, and selecting and placing employees. They also appraise employees’ performance (FIGURE A.1)—the topic we turn to next.

Performance appraisal serves organizational purposes: It helps decide who to retain, how to appropriately reward and pay people, and how to better harness employee strengths, sometimes with job shifts or promotions. Performance appraisal also serves individual purposes: Feedback affirms workers’ strengths and helps motivate needed improvements.

Performance appraisal methods include

In some organizations, performance feedback comes not only from supervisors but also from all organizational levels. If you join an organization that practices 360-degree feedback (FIGURE A.2), you will rate yourself, your manager, and your other colleagues, and you will be rated by your manager, other colleagues, and customers (Green, 2002). The net result is often more open communication and more complete appraisal.

Performance appraisal, like other social judgments, is vulnerable to bias (Murphy & Cleveland, 1995). Halo errors occur when one’s overall evaluation of an employee, or of a personal trait such as their friendliness, biases ratings of their specific work-related behaviors, such as their reliability. Leniency and severity errors reflect evaluators’ tendencies to be either too easy or too harsh on everyone. Recency errors occur when raters focus only on easily remembered recent behavior. By using multiple raters and developing objective, job-relevant performance measures, personnel psychologists seek to support their organizations while also helping employees perceive the appraisal process as fair.

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