Managing Staff Selection and Assessment (Managing Work and Organizations Series)
Paul Iles
A critical, multi-paradigm examination of how organizations select and assess staff, arguing that assessment is best understood through four competing lenses—strategic management, psychometric, social process, and critical discourse—rather than the dominant psychometric model alone.
Most textbooks treat staff selection as a technical problem of measuring the right traits accurately; Paul Iles' book breaks decisively from that view by presenting selection and assessment as a strategically vital, socially constructed, and politically charged activity. Weaving together four disciplinary paradigms—American strategic management, differential psychology's psychometrics, European social psychology's social process model, and Foucauldian critical discourse theory—Iles shows how assessment can drive organizational and cultural change, how it is shaped by national and cultural context, how it profoundly affects candidates' self-perceptions and careers, and how it operates as a technology of organizational power. Grounded in real case studies (building societies, IT firms, banks, a Finnish paper multinational) and international comparative research, the book culminates in a rich analysis of managerial competence, revealing both the promise and the limits of competency frameworks. It is essential for anyone who wants to manage assessment thoughtfully rather than merely administer tests.
The model it argues
An integrative framework in which contextual conditions and design levers (corporate strategy, strategic job analysis, choice of assessment methods) shape psychological and social states in candidates and selectors, which in turn drive outcomes such as selection quality, candidate reactions, equality, competitive advantage, and the exercise of organizational power. The model synthesizes strategic, psychometric, social process, and discourse perspectives.
Key ideas
- Corporate Strategy Alignment of Assessment
- The extent to which an organization deliberately integrates its selection and assessment practices with corporate strategy, structure, culture, and life-cycle stage.
- Strategic Job Analysis
- Systematic, future-oriented analysis of jobs and roles to identify the knowledge, skills, competencies and attributes required now and in the future.
- Assessment Method Validity and Rigour
- The reliability, validity, and structure of the assessment methods an organization uses to predict relevant work criteria.
- Fairness and Adverse Impact of Methods
- The degree to which assessment procedures avoid unfair discrimination and disproportionate rejection of protected groups.
- Cultural and National Context
- The set of national-cultural, legal, professional and industrial-relations conditions that shape assessment practice and its legitimacy.
- Candidate Perceived Fairness and Justice
- Candidates' subjective judgements of the fairness, accuracy, adequacy and career relevance of the assessment process.
- Candidate Self-Perception (Self-Efficacy and Self-Esteem)
- The self-related psychological states of candidates that are influenced by the assessment process and outcome.
- Organizational and Career Attitudes
- Attitudes toward the organization and one's career, including commitment and trust, shaped by the selection process and outcome.