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Selection Strategies

Selection and Assessment Consulting

Selection strategies differ from organization to organization in any number of ways. Some rely mostly on tests, others on interviews. Some are computer or Web based, others paper-and-pencil tests. Some automatically select candidates out, whereas others inform decisions that select candidates in—and so on. Selection strategies are the result of many design decisions, and it is safe to say that no two strategies are the same.

The purpose of this entry is to describe different selection strategies and evaluate the effectiveness of those strategies in different employment situations. These descriptions and evaluations will be limited to the manner in which information from the selection procedures is used to make selection decisions. This entry will not address strategies relating to delivery methods or types of assessment procedures. Rather, the focus will be on describing and evaluating the different strategies that organizations use to make selection decisions.

Framework

This entry is organized into two major sections. The first section will identify and describe the most common types of selection decision-making strategies. This section is primarily descriptive and highlights key differences among the strategies. The second section will evaluate these strategies based on their fit with each of several types of employment context. The employment context is defined based on three considerations: (a) employment volume (high/low), (b) mode of employment processing (continuous/episodic), and (c) the organization's culture for accountability (systems accountability/manager accountability). The decision-making strategies will be evaluated based on their fit with each of the eight combinations of volume, mode, and accountability. Although this approach is somewhat artificial—actual employment contexts are not likely to be exact invariant combinations of volume, mode, and accountability—it has the advantage of being systematic and reveals key principles that can be applied to any employment context.

This essay will not evaluate strategies based on considerations of legal risk. Certainly, legal risk is an important consideration in the design of any selection strategy. The primary means of controlling legal risk is the documentation of validation evidence. However, legal risk can also be influenced by the extent to which selection decisions are not precisely prescribed and uniformly applied to all candidates. Although the latter considerations certainly relate to decisionmaking strategies, legal risk often depends on subtle and nuanced aspects of the situation and the particular charge, making it difficult to offer general guidelines beyond the principles of validity, adverse impact, and consistency of application, which may be applied to any decision-making strategy.

Selection Decision-Making Strategies

Some of the strategies described here are typically mutually exclusive, such as multiple hurdles and compensatory scoring, whereas others are not, such as compensatory scoring and profile matching. The descriptions offered here summarize the relationships among the most commonly used strategies. The first two strategies, multiple hurdles and compensatory scoring, are typically viewed as mutually exclusive, although hybrid strategies are beginning to emerge. The third and fourth strategies, cut scores and noncut-score-based judgment methods, are deliberately defined as mutually exclusive to clarify their most important differences. The fifth strategy, banding, is a class of methods introduced primarily to manage legal risk in certain types of situations but not equally applicable in all employment contexts.

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