Productivity Improvement

Employee Evaluation and Selection

Purpose and validity of the employee evaluation and selection process

The specific purposes of an employee evaluation interview are:

• To assist in the assessment of candidates capacity and motivation to perform a particular job within an organization, to the satisfaction of the organization.
• To help the candidates formulate her / his own assessment of the job and the organization.

The interview may be the only tool which is used for selection, or it may form one stage in a sequence of eliminating hurdles. These can include medical checks, school reports, references, intelligence tests, personality tests, aptitude tests and group assessment techniques.

Validity of the employee evaluation and selection process

Much has been written about the validity of the interview as a selection tool. It is regarded by some as being so subjective as to be totally worthless. Interviewer bias, prejudice and the halo / horn effect undermine, so the argument goes, any pretence of an objective assessment of the candidates suitability. The proponents of this view advocate scrapping the interview in favor of tests.

Some interviewers, on the other hand, will confess to no such human frailty. They maintain that they can tell as soon as the candidate has walked through the door of the interview room, whether the person is suitable or not. "When you've been in the game as long as I have you can spot them straight away," they say.

Such interviewers, with implicit faith in their own judgement, tend to assume that their own highly personalized methods are the right answer to their (and every one else) problems. For them, the sophistication of testing is wasted on an exercise as simple as summing up another person's character and abilities.

Undoubtedly, a properly conducted job interview should have a place, and a fairly significant one, in any selection process. But properly conducted, means something rather less hit and miss than the "I can spot them..." approach.

A properly conducted selection interview is one where the interviewer does not pretend to be free from bias and prejudice and susceptibility to the halo effect. It is one where the interviewer has examined his own attitudes sufficiently thoroughly to be aware when these forces may be coming into play, and to make allowance for them.

Even where the candidate will ultimately be required to work with the interviewer, this principle holds good. It is in the nature of such misconceptions that they are eventually found to be either ill founded or illegal.

Employee evaluation and selection process requirements

What is required during the employee evaluation and selection interview in particular is interviewer discipline. Discipline to work out what it is that interviewer (or more appropriately what the organization) is looking for and why is he looking for it;

• to consider how he will recognize it when he sees it;
• how he will judge whether it is there in sufficient quantity;
• and to assess each employee or potential employee strictly in terms of the qualities and attributes he has described, rather than in terms of his own likes and dislikes.

This discipline can only be achieved with effort. It is after all, much easy to say "I just did not take to him", but you may have lost the organization an effective worker or even potential savior. So we start with discipline and the embodiment of this will be found in the stages of preparation for employee evaluation and selection interviewing that will be described shortly.

Self discipline is but one factor. It would be foolish to discount the power of gut instinct. If at the end of a detailed and objective assessment the interviewer finds that there is something that just does not fit, he / she should beware. He / she should reevaluate his / her data, search his / her inner self afresh to be sure that it is not the accent with which the interviewee speaks, or the way he parts his hair that is reminiscent of someone who holds unfortunate associations for him / her.

If he / she is still not satisfied, if there is still something he / she cannot quite put his / her finger on, he / she should either seek a second opinion, through references or a second interview with an unprepared colleague or, if neither of these is feasible, write a polite letter rejecting the candidate.

Importance of employee evaluation

Putting square pegs into round has never been good employment practice, and can have a very adverse effect on the organizations performance if multiplied by a sufficiently high number.

Today, it is positively detrimental for all concerned, not least the square peg. It is a truism which the law seems to be making constantly truer; that it is a lot easier to get square pegs in, than get them out. They may only be eased out finally after a considerable amount of humiliation and bitterness, which helps neither the employer or the employee.

Correct selection is therefore of crucial importance. And correct selection must mean that both parties to the selection decision, interviewer and interviewee, are satisfied, in all circumstances, the right decisions has been made. The candidate who has been subjected to a battery of tests, however thoroughly validated, will not necessarily feel this if he / she has never had a chance to talk to a member of the organization.

Similarly, the interviewer who has never met the candidate cannot be sure that the approved ingredients detected by the tests do really go to make up an acceptable whole whose appearance and impact on others match his / her test scores and whose tenacity and motivation augur well for success in the job.

Next | Establishing constructs for the job interview questions