Personnel Selection: Adding Value Through People - A Changing Picture

This is a fully updated edition of Personnel Selection, a seminal text on the psychometric approach to personnel selection by a noted expert in the field.

• Focuses on cutting-edge topics including the influence of social networking sites, adverse impact, age differences and stereotypes, distribution of work performance, and the problems of selecting new employees using research based on incumbent employees
• Questions established beliefs in the field, especially issues that have been characterized as “not a problem,” such as differential validity, over-reliance on self-report, and “faking good”
• Contains expanded discussion of research and practice in the US and internationally, while maintaining the definitive coverage of UK and European selection approaches
• Provides comprehensive yet accessible information for professionals and students, as well as helpful pedagogical tools (technical and statistical boxes, simplified figures and tables, research agenda boxes, key point summaries, and key references)

Preface to the first edition ix

1 Old and new selection methods 1

We’ve always done it this way

2 Validity of selection methods 25

How do you know it works?

3 Job description, work analysis and competences 55

If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll end up somewhere else

4 The interview 71

‘I know one when I see one’

5 References and ratings 94

The eye of the beholder

6 Tests of mental ability 110

‘a … man of paralysing stupidity’

7 Assessing personality by questionnaire 138

Do you worry about awful things that might happen?

8 Alternative ways of assessing personality 173

What year was the Bataan death march?

9 Biodata and weighted application blanks 192

How old were you when you learned to swim?

10 Assessment centres 207

Does your face fit?

11 Emotional intelligence and other methods 227

‘Success in work is 80% dependent on emotional intelligence’

12 Criteria of work performance 246

‘the successful employee… does more work, does it better, with less supervision’

13 Minorities, fairness and the law 268

Getting the numbers right

14 The value of good employees 289

The best is twice as good as the worst

15 Conclusions 307

Calculating the cost of smugness

References 319

Index 348

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