Employee Selection

After the recruitment process has produced a pool of qualified applicants, the selection process is used to deter-mine which applicants have the best chance of performing well on the job. Selection the process of gathering information about job applicants to decide who should be offered a job.

To make sure that selection decisions are accurate and legally defendable, the EEOC’s Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures recommend that all selection procedures be validated. Validation is the process of determining how well a selection test or procedure predicts future job performance.

Selection tests give organizational decision makers a chance to know who will likely do well in a job and who won’t. In interviews, company representatives ask job applicants job-related questions to determine whether they are qualified for the job. Interviews are probably the most frequently used and relied on selection device.

In unstructured interviews, interviewers are free to ask applicants anything they want, and studies show that they do. Semistructured interviews lie between structured and unstructured interviews.

How well do interviews predict future job performance? Contrary to what you’ve probably heard, recent evidence indicates that even unstructured interviews do a fairly good job. When conducted properly, however, structured interviews can lead to much more accurate hiring decisions than unstructured interviews. In some cases, the validity of structured interviews can rival that of cognitive ability tests.