Staffing Decisions the Staffing Process, Be it

Staffing Decisions

The staffing process, be it hiring, selecting or deselecting of individuals is usually quite a complex and multidimensional decision making process that can have ramifications on teams, individuals and even organizations. The paper will look at how staffing decisions are made using a particular staffing model or decision making system. It will also give an explanation on the role of validity, utility and fairness when it comes to evaluation of staffing decision. Ethical and legal issues that might arise from staffing procedures that do not meet standards will also be highlighted.

Staffing decisions are those that are associated with recruitment, selection, promotion and separation of employees. Modern jobs are quite complex and therefore for one to be successful in these modern jobs they have to have attributes like general mental ability, conscientiousness, communication skills as well as specialized knowledge. This implies that information on a candidate has to combine so as to make a good staffing decision. The two common staffing models are comprehensive selection systems and compensatory selection systems (Landy, F.J., & Conte, 2013).

Comprehensive selection system

The staffing model has to be comprehensive in that it gathers enough information about a candidate so as to predict their likelihood of success on varied demands of the specific job. This implies that we have to predict important aspects of the particular job when it comes to performance, these are technical performance as well as the OCB performance.

Compensatory selection system

When it comes to the staffing process in that a good score in an interview can compensate for a slightly lower score on cognitive ability test. If an attribute turns to be more important than another there are ways that the individual scores can be weighted in order to give one score that has a greater influence on the total score which is ultimately used for selection (Landy, F.J., & Conte, 2013).

Staffing outcomes can be evaluated in different ways with the major aspects being validity, utility and fairness. Staffing decisions are supposed to serve business-related purposes. The outcomes of these staffing decisions are therefore expected to populate an organization with workers that have the required skills, knowledge, abilities and personality characteristics. Staffing decisions involve inferences on the match of an individual and the job; the one making the decision is expected to infer or give a prediction of something on the probable success of various candidates and choose among them the one with the highest probability of success. This therefore means that the staffing decisions have to be valid. A utility analysis of the staffing decision addresses the cost/benefit ratio of ne of the staffing strategies against another. The term utility gain is synonymous with utility. The concept of utility gain or economic utility is good to keep in mind when evaluating the effectiveness of a specific staffing strategy. There are different definitions of the term fair in staffing decisions. Feeling of unfairness often results in negative action on an applicant or employee. These actions include filling lawsuits, formal grievances and counterproductive behaviors. When the feelings of unfairness are acted upon they cost the organization money and time and destruct the overall staffing process (Landy, F.J., & Conte, 2013).