Personnel Evaluation

Personnel evaluation refers to the systematic assessment of a person's qualifications or performance in relation to a role and larger defensible purpose. Personnel evaluation applies to a wide range of appointments, including the complex of unskilled, skilled, and professional roles in factories, stores, restaurants, airline companies, sports teams, schools, universities, hospitals, churches, government agencies, nongovernment service organizations, law firms, military services, and many others. Any enterprise's effectiveness and propriety is dependent on the intelligence, special talents, values, ethical behavior, attitudes, personal demeanor, social skills, motivation, efforts, and achievements of its personnel. Many organizations invest heavily to compensate and support their personnel during active employment and later during retirement. To make personnel costs pay off, organizations need to address a wide range of personnel matters. Among the most important are valid evaluations to guide personnel decisions and actions, ensure accountability, and foster and assess ongoing development of human resources.

Practices of personnel evaluation are discernible in virtually every sector of society—pilot selection systems, military personnel efficiency reports, and faculty evaluation systems, to name a few. However, sound personnel evaluation is not an integrated, mature professional area. The different areas of personnel evaluation tend to be idiosyncratic and not congealed by professional societies, shared literatures, or unified sets of standards. Overall, personnel evaluation is vital to the public good but is primitive, fragmented, and in need of substantial development and integration.

This entry identifies nine key attributes of sound personnel evaluation. Write-ups of the attributes are intended, in general, to characterize and comment on the landscape of personnel evaluation.