Ensuring Business Success by Choosing the Best People
Using the best possible selection procedure makes sound business sense. The people you choose will be better fitted to their roles and therefore more productive in terms of meeting the needs of your customers. This month we summarise two articles that guide you to ensuring that you select the best people and reap the benefits of best practice selection.
Assessment centres have the potential to be the best way of choosing the people who will bring about your organisation's success. Unfortunately many assessment centres fail to achieve their purpose because of poorly designed exercises or badly trained assessors. This month's articles help to confirm the best practice that will guide you to having an assessment centre that works properly.
The first, by Filip Lievens of Ghent University, tries to throw light on the pervasive 'exercise effect'. This is the label given to the finding that ratings for the same competency across different assessment centre exercises have less in common than ratings for the different competencies in any one exercise. Filip Lievens in his article, demonstrates that the 'exercise effect' is partly attributable to genuine variation by people in the level of each competency they show in different exercises. For example, the person with great interpersonal skills in a role play might be less skilful in the group exercise.
The finding has a number of practical implications:
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Assessment centre exercises must replicate the range of situations for the job the candidate will be doing. Otherwise you might well just test candidates in the situation they are good at - or bad at. This is precisely the risk that is run by relying solely on an interview. The person might be fine in that situation but abrasive with a group of colleagues and inarticulate with written work.
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The exercises must get as near as possible to being samples of the actual work the person will do. If people vary between situations, they will certainly vary between fictitious 'jungle survival' type exercises and the real world of work. Jungle survival tells us little or nothing about office survival.
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Assessors should examine the pattern of ratings across exercises and take seriously the differences rather than treating them as error.
The second article, by a group of American psychologists led by Deidra Schleicher, looks at trying to reduce that part of the exercise effect which might be due to error by assessors rather than genuine variation by candidates. The approach by Schleicher and her colleagues was to give assessors 'frame of reference' (FOR) training. This training covers the following:
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Detailed understanding of the dimensions or competencies being measured at the centre and the behaviours that make up each competency.
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Discussion of behaviours indicative of the various levels of effectiveness for each competency. In other words, what would a person weak on interpersonal skill do in the group exercise and how does this contrast with a person who is strong?
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Practising evaluations of candidates in the exercises with feedback on the accuracy of rating.
The researchers found that this type of training helped to increase the discrimination between competencies within an exercise. They also found that ratings given after the training were more predictive of job performance than ratings without the training.
The practical implication of this article is simply that assessors must be properly trained. Yet, all too often, we hear about assessment centres that are greatly compromised by assessors receiving what amounts to a rushed briefing just beforehand. This is not good enough and is a foolish saving that could result in poor choices and would be hard to defend in court. Of course, budgets are tight and people are under severe time pressure. Skimping on assessor training is not the answer. It will cost more in the long run by bringing in people who are not the best people for business success.
How can Human Assets help?
The articles, taken together are further ammunition for our approach to assessment centres:
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Our exercises are always tailor-made and represent that full range of situations covered by the job.
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We take assessor training seriously and have been providing Frame of Reference training from the start - over 15 years ago.
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We evaluate our centres to make sure that ratings are accurate and predictive of success.
Above all, we urge you to evaluate your assessment centre and make sure that it conforms to best practice. A relatively brief statistical analysis of the ratings can tell you how accurate they are and how much you are suffering from the erroneous side of the exercise effect. Details of how to set about this can be found in Charles Woodruffe's book on assessment and development centres. The book also contains the American Best Practice guidelines on assessment centres. See here for more details.
If you would like to find out more, please contact our consultants on +44(0)20 7434 2122 or by email enquiries@humanassets.co.uk
References
Lievens, F. (2002) Trying to Understand the Different Pieces of the Construct Validity Puzzle of Assessment Centers: An Examination of Assessor and Assessee Effects. Journal of Applied Psychology, 87, 4, pp675-686.