Selection Assessment Methods
A research-based practitioner's guide showing HR professionals how to select and implement scientifically valid formal assessment methods to build a higher-quality, more productive workforce.
Organizations spend fortunes recruiting talent yet often select employees using haphazard, informal methods that fail to predict who will actually perform well. This concise, evidence-based guide by leading selection expert Elaine Pulakos dispels common myths about employment testing and demystifies the technical, legal, and measurement issues that scare HR professionals away from formal assessments. It surveys the full menu of proven assessment tools—cognitive ability tests, personality tests, structured interviews, work samples, assessment centers, situational judgment tests, biodata, integrity tests, and physical tests—and shows how each stacks up on four critical criteria: validity, adverse impact, cost, and applicant reactions. Grounded in job analysis and meta-analytic research, the book gives readers a practical roadmap for choosing the right combination of assessments for any job while balancing predictive power against legal risk and workforce diversity, delivering millions in productivity gains and cost savings.
The model it argues
A framework linking job analysis and assessment design choices to the psychological and evaluative properties of selection methods (validity, adverse impact, cost, applicant reactions) and ultimately to workforce quality and organizational outcomes.
Key ideas
- Job Analysis Rigor
- The thoroughness and quality of the process by which an organization identifies critical job tasks and the KSAs required to perform them, serving as the foundation for assessment design.
- Assessment Method Choice and Design
- The organizational decision about which formal assessment methods to adopt and how to develop them, including task-based versus KSA-based orientation and commercial versus custom construction.
- Breadth of KSA and Performance Coverage
- The comprehensiveness of the construct domain assessed by the overall selection process, including whether both technical task and contextual performance are predicted.
- Assessment Validity
- The degree to which an assessment method accurately predicts subsequent job performance, the single most important evaluative property of any selection tool.
- Adverse Impact
- The degree to which a selection method disproportionately screens out protected group members relative to majority group members.
- Assessment Cost
- The total resource cost of developing and administering an assessment method over its lifecycle.
- Applicant Reactions
- Candidates' positive or negative perceptions of and responses to an assessment method during the selection process.
- Legal Compliance
- The extent to which selection procedures conform to federal regulatory requirements including the Uniform Guidelines and the ADA.