As discussed, job analysis is the cornerstone of

EMPLOYEE SELECTION. Remember, unless

a complete and accurate picture of a job is obtained, it is
virtually impossible to select excellent employees. Thus,
during the job analysis process, in addition to identifying the
important tasks and duties, it is essential to identify the
knowledge, skills, and abilities needed to perform the job.
Therefore, every essential knowledge, skill, and ability
identified in the job analysis that is needed on the first day
of the job should be tested, and every test must somehow
relate to the job analysis. For example, if a job analysis
reveals that an office manager types correspondence and
proofreads reports to ensure that the reports are
grammatically correct, then the battery of selection tests
might include a typing test and a grammar test.

Recruitment
An important step in selecting employees is recruitment:
attracting people with the right qualifications (as determined
in the job analysis) to apply for the job. The first decision is
whether to promote someone from within the organization
(internal recruitment) or to hire someone from outside the
organization (external recruitment). If no qualified applicants
are found, the organizations then advertise outside.
Media Advertisements
Newspaper Ads
Running ads in periodicals such as local newspapers or professional journals is a
common method of recruiting employees. Recruiters rated newspaper advertising
as one of the most effective avenues of applicant recruitment.

Electronic Media
The potential advantage to using electronic media for recruitment is that many
watch television, and the average person spends more time watching TV
compared with minutes reading the newspaper.

Recruiters
Campus Recruiters
Many organizations send recruiters to college campuses to answer questions
about themselves and interview students for available positions.

Outside Recruiters
Private employment agencies and executive search firms are designed to make a
profit from recruitment activities, whereas public employment agencies are
operated by state and local public agencies and are strictly non-profit.

Employment Agencies and Search Firms

Employment Agencies
Employment agencies operate in one of two ways. They charge either the
company or the applicant when the applicant takes the job.

Executive Search Firms

Executive search firms, better known as “head hunters,” differ from employment
agencies in that the jobs they represent tend to be higher-paying, non–entry-level
positions such as executives, engineers, and computer programmers.
Public Employment Agencies
The third type of outside recruitment organization is state and local employment
agencies. These public employment agencies are designed primarily to help
the unemployed find work, but they often offer services such as career
advisement and résumé preparation.

Employee Referrals
Another way to recruit is by employee referral, in which current employees
recommend family members and friends for specific job openings.

Direct Mail
Because direct mail has been successful in product advertising, several
organizations have used it to recruit applicants, especially those who are not
actively job hunting. With direct-mail recruitment, an employer typically obtains a
mailing list and sends help-wanted letters or brochures to people through the
mail.

Internet
The Internet continues to be a fast-growing source of recruitment. Internet
recruiting efforts usually take one of two forms: employer-based websites and
Internet recruiting sites.

Internet Recruiters
An Internet recruiter is a private company whose web-site lists job openings for
hundreds of organizations and résumés for thousands of applicants.
Employers are finding that there are many advantages to using Internet
recruiting compared with traditional newspaper help-wanted ads. Perhaps the
biggest advantage is the cost; depending on the geographic location,
advertisement size, and length of the ad run, advertising in a major city
newspaper can be times more expensive than Internet recruiting. Internet
recruiting reaches more people over a larger geographic area than do newspaper
ads.
Job Fairs
Job fairs are typically conducted in one of two ways. In the first, many types of
organizations have booths at the same location. The second type of job fair has
many organizations in the same field in one location. The advantage to this type
of job fair is that with a single employment field represented, each visitor is a
potential applicant.

Effective Employee Selection Techniques

If the recruitment process was successful, an organization
will have several applicants from which to choose. At this
point, many techniques can be used to select the best
person from this pool of applicants. But the discussion will
focus on employment interview, and such methods as
reference checks, assessment centers, biodata,
psychological tests, and physical ability tests will be
discussed after.

Employment Interviews
Undoubtedly, the most commonly used method to select
employees is the employment interview. In fact, if you
think back to all of the part-time and summer jobs to which
you applied, most of those jobs were obtained after you
went through an interview process. You might even
remember the sweaty palms that went along with the
interview. In all likelihood, the interviews you have been
through could be labeled “traditional” or “unstructured” and
must be distinguished from the structured interviews.
 Types of Interviews
Perhaps a good place to start a discussion on interviews is
to define the various types. Interviews vary on three main
factors: structure, style, and medium.

Structure
The structure of an interview is determined by the source of
the questions, the extent to which all applicants are asked
the same questions, and the structure of the system used to
score the answers. A structured interview is one in which
(a) the source of the questions is a job analysis (job-related
questions), (b) all applicants are asked the same questions,
and (c) there is a standardized scoring key to evaluate each
answer. An unstructured interview is one in which
interviewers are free to ask anything they want (e.g., Where
do you want to be in five years? What was the last book you
read?), are not required to have consistency in what they ask
of each applicant, and may assign numbers of points at their
own discretion. Interviews vary in their structure, and rather
than calling interviews structured or unstructured, it might
make more sense to use terms such as highly structured (all
three criteria are met), moderately structured (two criteria are
met), slightly structured (one criterion is met), and
unstructured (none of the three criteria are met). The
research is clear that highly structured interviews are more
reliable and valid than interviews with less structure.
Style
The style of an interview is determined by the number of
interviewees and number of interviewers. One-on-one
interviews involve one interviewer interviewing one applicant.
Serial interviews involve a series of single interviews. For
example, the HR manager might interview an applicant at
9:00 a.m., the department supervisor interviews the applicant
at 10:00 a.m., and the vice-president interviews the applicant
at 11:00 a.m. Return interviews are similar to serial
interviews with the difference being a passing of time
between the first and subsequent interview. For example, an
applicant might be interviewed by the HR manager and then
brought back a week later to interview with the vice-
president. Panel interviews have multiple interviewers asking
questions and evaluating answers of the same applicant at
the same time, and group interviews have multiple applicants
answering questions during the same interview. Of course,
one could put together several combinations such as a
serial-panel-group interview, but life is too short for such
nonsense.

Medium
Interviews also differ in the extent to which they are done in
person. In face-to-face interviews, both the interviewer and
the applicant are in the same room. Face-to-face interviews
provide a personal setting and allow the participants to use
both visual and vocal cues to evaluate information.
Telephone interviews are often used to screen applicants but
do not allow the use of visual cues (not always a bad thing).
Videoconference interviews are conducted at remote sites.
The applicant and the interviewer can hear and see each
other, but the setting is not as personal, nor is the image and
vocal quality of the interview as sharp as in face- to-face
interviews. Written interviews involve the applicant answering
a series of written questions and then sending the answers
back through regular mail or through email.
Creating Interview Questions
There are six types of interview questions: clarifiers,
disqualifiers, skill-level determiners, past-focused, future-
focused, and organizational fit.

Clarifiers allow the interviewer to clarify information in

the résumé, cover letter, and application, fill in gaps, and
obtain other necessary information. Because each
applicant’s résumé and cover letter are unique, specific
clarifiers are not standard across applicants.

Disqualifiers are questions that must be answered in a

particular way or the applicant is disqualified. For example,
if a job requires that employees work on weekends, a
disqualifier might be, “Are you available to work on
weekends?” If the answer is no, the applicant will not get
the job.

Skill-level determiners tap an interviewee’s level of

expertise. For example, if an applicant says she is proficient
in Microsoft Word, an interviewer might ask some questions
about the word processing program. If an applicant claims
to be fluent in Spanish, the interviewer might want to ask
her a few questions in Spanish.

Future-focused questions, also called situational

questions, ask an applicant what she would do in a
particular situation. It is important that these questions can
be answered with the applicant’s current knowledge. That
is, asking police applicants situational questions in which
they would need knowledge of police procedures would not
be appropriate because they won’t learn this information
until they graduate from the police academy.
 Past-focused questions, sometimes referred to as
patterned behavior description interviews (PBDIs), differ
from situational interview questions by focusing on previous
behavior rather than future intended behavior. That is,
applicants are asked to provide specific examples of how
they demonstrated job-related skills in previous jobs.

Rather than trying to predict future performance,

organizational-fit questions tap the extent to which an
applicant will fit into the culture of an organization or with
the leadership style of a particular supervisor. For example,
some organizations are very policy oriented, whereas
others encourage employees to use their initiative. Some
supervisors are very task oriented, whereas others are
more person oriented. The idea behind organizational-fit
questions is to make sure that the applicant’s personality
and goals are consistent with those of the organization.