Selecting and Placing Human Resources

Selection is the process of choosing individuals who have relevant qualifications to fill jobs in an organization. Without qualified employees, an organization is in a poorer position to succeed. A vivid case in point is athletic organizations like the Dallas Cowboys, Atlanta Braves, and Los Angeles Lakers, who fail or succeed on their ability to select the coaches, players, and other employees to win games.

Selection is much more than just choosing the best available person. Selecting the appropriate set of knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs)—which come packaged in a human being—is an attempt to get a “fit” between what the applicant can and wants to do, and what the organization needs. The task is made more difficult because it is not always possible to tell exactly what the applicant really can and wants to do. Fit between the applicant and the organization affects both the employer’s willingness to make a job offer and an applicant’s willingness to accept a job. Fitting a person to the right job is called placement.

More than anything else, placement of human resources should be seen as a matching process. Gaps between an individual’s skills and the job requirements are common factors that lead to rejection of an applicant. How well an employee is matched to a job affects the amount and quality of the employee’s work. This matching also directly affects training and operating costs. Workers who are unable to produce the expected amount and quality of work can cost an organization a great deal of money and time. Estimates are that hiring an inappropriate employee costs an employer three to five times that employee’s salary before it is resolved.2 Yet hiring mistakes are relatively common.

Good selection and placement decisions are an important part of successful HR management. Some would argue that these decisions are the most important part. Productivity improvement for an employer may come from changes in incentive pay plans, improved training, or better job design; but unless the employer has the necessary people with the appropriate KSAs in place, those changes may not have much impact. The very best training will not enable someone with little aptitude for a certain job to do that job well and enjoy it.

To put selection decisions in perspective, consider that organizations on average reject a high percentage of applicants. In some situations about five out of six applicants for jobs are rejected. Figure 9—1 depicts the reasons why employers most often reject applicants. Perhaps the best perspective on selection and placement comes from two traditional HR truisms that clearly identify the importance of effective employment selection.

• “Good training will not make up for bad selection.” The implication here is that when the right people with the appropriate KSAs are not selected for jobs, it is very difficult for the employer to recover later by somehow trying to train those individuals without the proper aptitude, interests, or other KSA deficiencies.
  

• “If you don’t hire the right one, your competitor will.” There is an opportunity cost in failure to select the right employee, and that cost is that the “right one” went somewhere else.

Criteria, Predictors, and Job Performance

At the heart of an effective selection system is knowledge of what constitutes appropriate job performance and what characteristics in employees are associated with that performance.4 Once the definition of employee success (performance) is known, the employee specifications required to achieve that success can be determined. A selection criterion is a characteristic that a person must have to do the job successfully. A certain preexisting ability is often a selection criterion. One example is the criterion appropriate employee permanence, which considers that a person must stay in a job long enough for the employer at least to break even on the training and hiring expenses incurred to hire the employee. Figure 9—3 shows that ability, motivation, intelligence, conscientiousness, appropriate risk, and permanence might be good selection criteria for many jobs. To predict whether a selection criterion (such as “motivation” or “ability”) is present, employers try to identify predictors as measurable indicators of selection criteria. For example, in Figure 9—3 good predictors of the criterion “appropriate permanence” might be individual interests, salary requirements, and tenure on previous jobs.

The information gathered about an applicant should be focused on finding predictors of the likelihood that the applicant will be able to perform the job well. Predictors can take many forms, but they should be job related, valid, and reliable. A test score can be a predictor of success on the job only if it is valid. Previous experience can be a predictor of success if it is related to the necessary performance on the current job. Any selection tool used (for example, application form, test, interview, education requirements, or years of experience

required) should be used only if it is a valid predictor of job performance. Using invalid predictors can result in selecting the “wrong” candidate and rejecting the “right” one.

VALIDITY Validity is the correlation between a predictor and job performance. As mentioned in Chapter 5, validity occurs to the extent that a predictor actually predicts what it is supposed to predict. Validity depends on the situation in which the selection device is being used.5 For example, a test designed to predict aptitude for child-care jobs might not be valid in predicting sales potential in a candidate for a sales representative.

RELIABILITY Reliability of a predictor is the extent to which it repeatedly produces the same results, over time. For example, if the same person took a test in December and scored 100, but upon taking it in March scored significantly higher, the test would not be highly reliable. Thus, reliability has to do with consistency, and predictors that are useful in selection should be consistent.

source by Human Resource Management 9th Edition Robert L. Mathis John H