science

Personnel selection

Personnel selection is a science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Personnel selection rather than just read about it. In short: Personnel selection is the methodical process used to hire (or, less commonly, promote) individuals. Although the term can apply to all aspects of the process (recruitment, selection, hiring, onboarding, acculturation, etc.) the most common meaning focuses on the selection of workers.

Key takeaways

Personnel selection belongs to science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Personnel selection to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Personnel selection from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Personnel selection is the methodical process used to hire (or, less commonly, promote) individuals. Although the term can apply to all aspects of the process (recruitment, selection, hiring, onboarding, acculturation, etc.) the most common meaning focuses on the selection of workers. In this respect, selected prospects are separated from rejected applicants with the intention of choosing the person who will be the most successful and make the most valuable contributions to the organization. Its effect on the group is discerned when the selected accomplish their desired impact to the group, through achievement or tenure. The procedure of selection takes after strategy to gather data around a person so as to figure out whether that individual ought to be utilized. The strategies used must be in compliance with the various laws in respect to work force selection.

Overview The professional standards of industrial-organizational psychologists (I-O psychologists) require that any selection system be based on a job analysis to ensure that the selection criteria are job-related. The requirements for a selection system are characteristics known as KSAOs – knowledge, skills, ability, and other characteristics. US law also recognizes bona fide occupational qualifications (BFOQs), which are requirements for a job which would be considered discriminatory if not necessary – such as only employing men as wardens of maximum-security male prisons, enforcing a mandatory retirement age for airline pilots, a religious college only employing professors of its religion to teach its theology, or a modeling agency only hiring women to model women's clothing. Personnel selection systems employ evidence-based practices to determine the most qualified candidates and involve both the newly hired and those individuals who can be promoted from within the organization. In this respect, selection of personnel has "validity" if an unmistakable relationship can be shown between the system itself and the employment for which the people are ultimately being chosen for. In this way, a vital piece of selection is Job Analysis. An analysis is typically conducted before, and regularly as part of, the improvement in determination systems. Then again, a selection method may be deemed valid after it has already been executed by directing follow up job analysis and demonstrating the relationship between the selection process and the respective job.

The procedure of personnel selection includes gathering data about the potential candidates with the end goal of deciding suitability and sustainability for the employment in that particular job. This data is gathered utilizing one or more determination devices or strategies classified as such:

Application Forms Interviews Personality tests Biographical data Cognitive ability tests Physical ability tests Work samples Development and implementation of such screening methods is sometimes done by human resources departments; larger organizations hire consultants or firms that specialize in developing personnel selection systems. I-O psychologists must evaluate evidence regarding the extent to which selection tools predict job performance, evidence that bears on the validity of selection tools. These procedures are usually validated (shown to be job relevant), using one or more of the following types of validity: content validity, construct validity, and/or criterion-related validity.

History and development Chinese civil servant exams, established in AD 605, may be the first documented "modern" selection tests, and have influenced subsequent examination systems. As a scientific and scholarly field, personnel selection owes much to psychometric theory and the art of integrating selection systems falls to human resource professionals. In the United States of America, members of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP) conduct much of the research on selection. Primary research topics include:

the practicality, reliability, validity, and utility of various forms of selection measures methods for demonstrating return on investment for selection systems assessing fairness and making selection systems as fair as possible legal issues—such as disparate treatment and disparate impact—and overall compliance with laws the generalizability of validity across different work contexts alternative methods of demonstrating validity, such as synthetic validity the predictive validity of non-traditional measures, such as personality

Validity and reliability

… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Personnel selection

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Personnel selection claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Personnel selection before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Personnel selection ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Personnel selection

In research: Personnel selection appears in science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Personnel selection in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Personnel selection is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics Applied psychology, Behavioural sciences, Human resource management, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Personnel selection outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Personnel selection in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Personnel selection means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Personnel selection out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Personnel selection in simple terms?

Why does Personnel selection matter?

Because it connects several science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Personnel selection?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Personnel selection.