Employment Testing

In its broadest sense, an employment test is any identifiable or quantifiable piece of information about applicants or employees used to make personnel selection decisions. Equally as broad is the definition of personnel selection decisions, which may include any term or condition of employment such as hiring, training, benefits, pay, promotion, and termination. In accordance with the Principles for the Validation and Use of Personnel Selection Procedures (or simply, the Principles), any of the following pieces of information constitutes an employment test:

Paper-and-pencil tests, performance tests, work samples, personality inventories, interest inventories, projective techniques, tests of honesty or integrity including polygraph examinations, assessment center evaluations, biographical data forms or score application blanks, interviews, educational requirements, experience requirements, reference checks, physical requirements such as height and weight, physical ability tests, appraisals of job performance, computer-based test interpretations, estimates of advanced potentials, or any other selection instrument, whenever any one or a combination of them is used or assists in making a personnel decision.

There are two good reasons for adopting these broad definitions. First, in making selection decisions human resources (HR) managers should seek any data associated with (or predictive of) job performance. Second, HR managers must also be mindful of the myriad of legal issues associated with federal laws such as Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (as amended by the Civil Rights Act of 1991), the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, and various constitutional amendments. The major legal issues addressed as follows are (a) adverse impact on selection rates of minorities and women, (b) test items that constitute illegal inquiries into physical or mental impairments, (c) test formats that require reasonable accommodations for physically or mentally impaired applicants, and (d) test items that offend the right to privacy. Among these issues, adverse impact has received the lion's share of attention in federal court cases.

The concept of adverse impact is illustrated by society's post–Civil War reaction to the Thirteenth Amendment, which ended slavery, and the Fifteenth Amendment, which gave all (male) citizens the right to vote. Some states, unfriendly to such ideas, created barriers to this newfound right. Thus all citizens, to vote, had to own property, pay a poll tax, pass a reading test, and so on. Such practices were not completely outlawed until 1964 (in the Twenty-Sixth Amendment). Critically, the barriers to voting were not inherently discriminatory; indeed, on their face (or surface) they were neutral. In comparison, the prior policies were facially discriminatory, because whole classes of people were denied various rights and privileges, no questions asked. In short, although the barriers to voting did not facially exclude any group or class of citizens from voting, they had the effect (or impact) of excluding a much higher percentage of black voters than white voters.

Fast-forwarding 100 years to when Title VII was enacted to outlaw workplace discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin, we see that some employers turned to facially neutral selection policies that proved as arbitrary for job performance as poll taxes were for voting. However, unlike the voting rights issue, which required a constitutional amendment, these arbitrary job policies were struck down in a landmark unanimous U.S. Supreme Court decision in Griggs v. Duke Power (1971).

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