Company Selection Techniques Through Nearly a Century

Company Selection Techniques

Through nearly a century of academic research and clinical study, the field of industrial and organizational (I-O) psychology has attempted to quantify and classify the measures of relative worth which differentiate qualified prospective employees from those unsuitable for recruitment. In that time, a multitude of screening devices and testing techniques have been devised by I-O researchers, including psychological assessments, intelligence evaluation tests, and pre-employment interviews. While the field has invariably expanded to address other concerns, it has been consistently noted that "perhaps the greatest technological achievement in industrial and organizational (I -- O) psychology over the past 100 years is the development of decision aids (e.g., paper-and-pencil tests, structured interviews, mechanical combination of predictors) that substantially reduce error in the prediction of employee performance" (Highhouse, 2008).

The pursuit of perfection within the science of hiring employees began in 1913 when Hugo Munsterberg, a psychologist of German birth teaching at the prestigious Harvard University, authored his seminal work The Psychology of Industrial Efficiency, and "Munsterberg was an early advocate of the use of psychological tests to measure a prospective employee's skills and to match that person with the requirements of a particular job" (Schultz and Schultz, 2010). The pioneering research performed by Munsterberg and his successors within the field of I-O psychology eventually inspired the United States Army to utilize his screening methodologies during the buildup to World War I, and he personally contributed to the formation of the Army Alpha and Army Beta intelligence tests used to screen potential pilot and officer trainees.

The majority of modern companies and corporations have honed their hiring processes and eliminated errors "with recruitment Web sites, application forms, interviews, psychological tests, and other employee selection measures & #8230; and I-O psychologists have devised these selection measures to help employers determine whether someone is the right person for their job and whether that job is the most suitable one for them" (Schultz & Schultz, 2010). A growing opposition to certain screening techniques has been observed, however, by several I-O researchers who have found that some employers inevitably refuse to trust empirical data produced by testing and prefer to base their hiring on the intuition and instinct felt during a personal interview. An article published in 2008 within the scholarly journal Industrial and Organizational Psychology, entitled "Stubborn Reliance on Intuition and Subjectivity in Employee Selection," delved into this trend by examining the actual hiring practices of Human Resource managers of retail outlets. The authors of the study concluded that "the managers placed more emphasis on competencies assessed by unstructured interviews than on competencies measured by tests, regardless of what those competencies were" (Highhouse, 2008), which represents an institutional avoidance of clear data in favor of the proverbial gut-feeling. Studies such as this illustrate the obstacles faced by I-O psychologists, while confirming the overall value of the research they continue to produce and publish.