Evaluation of your selection process through Psychometrics

Back in July we ran an article in the newsletter entitled 'Selecting High Performers'. It was written by Bob Clifford who is a psychometrician.  As well as designing and validating psychometric instruments, his primary professional interest is in helping organisations improve the accuracy of their selection decisions, by applying the core principles of psychometrics to the whole selection process.

As a follow up to one of his suggestions from the first article Bob has looked specifically at the simple steps a recruiter should follow to validate their existing selection process. Basically to validate your selection process you should:

• Choose a role with at least 50 members of staff.
• Collect assessment data (ideally data from the employees' original selection process).
• Collect line manager ratings.
• Conduct statistical analyses (including 'descriptive' stats to show the role's typical profile; and 'inferential' stats, such as correlational analyses, to show which profiles predict the best performers).
• Interpret the findings in light of the organisational context and report on them.
• Use the findings to improve the selection process in future and to develop existing staff.

The full article is available on his website.