Introduction of Selection:

The process of interviewing and evaluate the candidates for a specific job and selecting an individual employment based on certain criteria. Employee selection can range from very simple process to a very complicated process depending on the firm hiring and the position. Certain employment laws such as anti-decimation must be obeyed during the employment selection.

Strategic Selection:

Strategic Selection engages the stakeholders and knowledge experts within the client company. The process identifies the characteristics and attributes required by “the job” to ensure success.
Strategic Selection is a patented and scientifically validated benchmarking process that allows our clients to identify high potential candidates, create career development fast-tracks and, as appropriate, promote from within by identifying “best fit” personnel. Promoting from within helps maintain a true company culture while boosting morale and keeping employees engaged.
This thorough job benchmark will

• Assess the position’s contribution to your company’s strategic goals
• Ensure that Key Stakeholders and Knowledge Experts are on the same page
• Evaluate the job/talent fit for the subject position
• Optimize the talent you already have
• Provide a powerful tool in the hiring process
• Improve ramp up time, or “Quick Start” the new hire
• Reduce time to hire and workforce turnover
• Establish a training/coaching plan to help your people achieve superior performance in their roles
• Increase the return on your investment in people

The importance of selection:

Employee selection is important as it is the process of recruiting and hiring employees who have the necessary qualifications to perform the jobs in an organization. It is important for three main reasons.

Firstly, an employee’s performance always depends on part of his or her subordinates. Employee with the right skills and attributes will do a better job for the company. Employees without necessary skills or the employees who are not abrasive or obstructionist won’t’ perform effectively and the firm will suffer.

Secondly, it is important because it is costly to recruit and hire employee. As an example, the total cost of hiring a manager could easily be 10 times high if the search fees, interviewing time, reference checking, and the travel expenses are added.

And the third, it is important because of the legal implications of incomplete hiring. EEO (Equal Employee Opportunity) laws and court decisions require nondiscriminatory selection procedure for protected groups. Furthermore, courts find employers liable when employee with criminal records or other problems take advantage of access to customer’s homes to commit crimes.

The effect of selection:

Selection the best employee is considered one of the most critical elements of a company’s success. Employing the right employees is essential to having a healthy business because employees represent the business. If the company hires employees who are inadequate at their job, the company will lose customers and a loss of customers translates to a loss of revenue. In short, the employees can affect the quality of the business. On the other hand the right employee selection can improved individual and team performance, reduced employee turnover costs, heightened team morale.

Basic Testing Concept:

Reliability:

Reliability is the extent to which an experiment, test, or any measuring procedure yields the same result on repeated trials. There are several ways to estimate reliability. A same test can be taken to the same people at two different times. Or, two alternate tests can be taken by the same person. A reliability test is the one which gives the same result in either of the ways followed.

IQ testing is an example of a highly reliable process with these characteristics. If you take the Stanford-Binet IQ test over and over, you will score a nearly identical result each time.

The test achieves reliability by defining intelligence very narrowly, as the ability to solve simple analytical problems. It measures intelligence via a multiple-choice test that can be evaluated with no possibility of bias in measurement or judgment.

Validity:

For a test to be valid, or truthful, it must first be reliable. A measure might be consistent (reliable) but not accurate (valid).Validity refers to the degree to which a study accurately reflects or assesses the specific concept that the researcher is attempting to measure. While reliability is concerned with the accuracy of the actual measuring instrument or procedure, validity is concerned with the study's success at measuring what the researchers set out to measure.

For example, many recreational activities of high school students involve driving cars. A researcher, wanting to measure whether recreational activities have a negative effect on grade point average in high school students, might conduct a survey, asking how many students drive to school and then attempt to find a correlation between the two factors. Because many students might use their cars for purposes other than or in addition to recreation (e.g., driving to work after school, driving to school rather than walking or taking a bus), this research study might prove invalid. Even if a strong correlation was found between driving and grade point average, driving to school in and of itself would seem to be an invalid measure of recreational activity.

Criterion Validity:

Criterion related validity is used to demonstrate the accuracy of a measurement or procedure by comparing it with another measurement or procedure which has been demonstrated to be valid. Demonstrating criterion validity means that those who do well on the test also do well on the job, and those who do poor on the test do poor on the job. Thus, the validity of the test is that people with higher test scores perform better on the job.

It refers to the extent to which one can infer from an individual's score on a test how well she will perform some other external task or activity that is supposedly measured by the test in question.

For example, imagine a hands-on driving test has been shown to be an accurate test of driving skills. By comparing the scores on the written driving test with the scores from the hands-on driving test, the written test can be validated by using a criterion related strategy in which the hands-on driving test is compared to the written test.

Content Validity:

It refers to the extent to which the content of a test's items represents the entire body of content to be measured. The basic issue in content validation is representativeness.

For example, researchers aim to study mathematical learning and create a survey to test for mathematical skill. If these researchers only tested for multiplication and then drew conclusions from that survey, their study would not show content validity because it excludes other mathematical functions. Although the establishment of content validity for placement-type exams seems relatively straight-forward, the process becomes more complex as it moves into the more abstract domain of socio-cultural studies. I.e. a researcher needing to measure an attitude like self-esteem must decide what constitutes a relevant domain of content for that attitude. For socio-cultural studies, content validity forces the researchers to define the very domains they are attempting to study.

Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO):

It is the most important part of selection process. It is a worldwide international approved law and also a guideline to apply to all selection devices including interviews, applications and references. Equal employee opportunity reduces discrimination on respect to race, color, age, religion, sex, disability, and natural origin. By applying this policy, the test has to prove on the success and failure in the job. Employer have to prove that his test don’t unfairly discriminate against minority or non minority subgroups. An employer cannot avoid EEO laws.

Some testing of selection:

Intelligence test:

This test includes the range of ability including memory, vocabulary, verbal fluency, and numerical ability. In intelligence some IQ tests are given to justify the IQ level of the employees.

For example, in the army, they often test the cadets IQ level by giving them mathematical problem to see how fast they can solve the problem. (Source: www.army.mil.bd)

Psychological test:

In this test, psychologist sometimes show some pictures and ask the person to interpret the pictures, after that he/she interpret that picture in a way that the psychologist will easily identify about the candidates personal life, about his/her maturity. Here in this process, an employer can easily identify how the candidates are and compare the candidate’s caliber to the desired caliber that an employer wanted for the organization. Such as, in law enforcement officer’s selection, an employer wants the caliber of good physical fitness, responsible, socialization, good in follow the command, discipline. But in multinational companies, employer wants hard working people, creative ability, and extroversion.
(Source: http://www.defence.pk/forums/general-defence/7394-issb-psychology-test.html)

Test in Physical Abilities:
Test of physical abilities include static strength, dynamic strength, body co ordination and stamina.
For example, for selecting a lifeguard, they need to have this ability for doing their job. Even in the army selection, what they do is apply a full body medical test which is known as preliminary test and also they give some obstacle such as rope climbing, 1km sprint run, swimming etc hard labor jobs to testify whether those candidates strength, nerves, stamina is strong enough for taking the load of further combat and commando training because in this field of job, body fitness and strong leadership and discipline is the primary thing.
(Source: http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf&AD=ADA515112)

Test in Motor ability:
To measure the Motor abilities, such as finger dexterity, manual dexterity, and reaction time, it measures the speed and accuracy of simple judgment as well as the speed of finger, hand, and arm movement. These types of tests are done especially on mechanical engineering.
(Source: www.bteb.gov.bd)

Web based testing:

In this process, what the employer do in using the web or internet for testing and screening applicants. Web based testing reduce paper pencil test and save money and time. In this testing employer takes an online role playing call simulation.
For example in a marketing firm, applicants put on a headset, and the program plays seven different customer situations and the applicants answer multiple choice question online as how they would respond. Here the applicants fill out the job application form and also give their CV in the web and the company’s software automatically does the screening jobs.

Work sampling and employee selection:

This is a technique of how a candidate will actually perform in the jobs basic task. Work samples are clearly related to the job that is testing for fair employment. Sampling does not delve into the applicant’s personality or psyche, so there’s no chance of being viewed as an invasion of privacy. A good designed work sampling has better validity. Basic procedure is to choose several tasks crucial to performing the job and to test applicants on samples of each. An observer monitor the performance of each jobs, indicates a checklists how well the applicant perform. Simulation in aviation is also a part of work sampling.

Reference:

Sometimes an employer wants to check and verify the applicant’s background information. Verified data’s are legal eligibility for employment, military service including discharge information, education qualifications, identifications, criminal records, social security number, motor vehicles records, credit, licensing, and verification and reference checks. This type of search depends on what position the employer wants to hire.
For example if an employer wants to hire a security admin for the organization, then he will definitely want candidate with military background, how well he/she was in the military. But if an employer wants an employee for finance or accounts, then he will check on his previous works, whether he had been involved in any crime, verify his identification clearly to figure out he is honest or not because the post is very sensitive. Proper background and reference check is very important because it has the possibility to avoid crooked personnel from selection. Nowadays most of the employers try to verify applicant’s current position and salary with his current employer. It is an inexpensive and straight forward way to verify factual information about the applicants.

Questions

* What are the sources of your selection? * Do you use any consultant for the selection? If yes, how do you select the consultant? * Does organization use any particular selection policy? If yes, what is it and what are the strategies are? * What are the challenges in selection process that you had faced? * Which selection method do you usually follow for the company? * Does your organization take interview on the candidates? If yes, what are the things that you people observe? * Does your organization have the facility of job sampling? * Does your organization prefer reference? * Does the organization follow equal employment opportunity policy? * Do organization still follow paper pencil test? If yes, what are the questions patterns are?

Selection process of GRAMEEN PHONE in brief:

After interviewing an HR executive in Grameen Phone (GP), we learned that they prefer people who are extrovert, have the caliber to influence others. In fact they strongly believe in equal employment opportunity. As Telenor is very famous on equal employment opportunity, they always encourage this policy in the selection process so that they can reduce gender discrimination in the organization. They strongly evaluate the candidate for selection. Every candidate has to go throughthe entire test and must be qualified for getting the job.

For reducing gender discrimination and to attract the women for making a career, they provide 30% seats for the female candidates. They often provide other facilities such as transportation facility, maternal leave for the women candidates to encourage them for applying in GP. As our country is in the curse of gender discrimination, this policy is being applied in the selection process for making a female workforce.

GP’s entire HR administration is compared to the other International corporations. So their process of selection is highly recognized. They follow the selection process of those International companies.

GP uses a lot of testing in selection process. Testing depends on the candidates. Suppose, if they want to select candidates in Business background, they evaluate on his/her presentation skill, extroversion, leadership quality, smartness, intelligences, IQ , interviews etc. Candidates are often taken interviews and demo presentation on a case study to evaluate these skills. For selecting an engineer, they are given some electronic defused circuit problem and told them to solve as fast as they can. In IT sector, they sometimes use web based testing in video conferencing to learn how advance the candidate is in using these technologies. For selection of fresher candidates, they apply traditional paper pencil exam to evaluate his/her memory status, thinking abilities, language skills. The HR executive often take interviews of candidates and what they mostly observe is the candidate’s smartness, intelligence, if they have the drive to work, honesty, and of course how presentable the candidate is. There is a line in the corporate world “Shoe reveals how presentable you are”. Shinier the shoe, the more conscious and presentable you are.

HR executives often face some difficulties. The most common difficulty they face is time. The way they place the selection strategy, to select people, they don’t get enough time to do the task. That is why they have to take a load of stress. For example, HR executives commonly take interviews and presentation for selecting proper candidates because these two testing are the most effective process to identify a candidate clearly, although it is time consuming. Applying this test on 500 candidates is too difficult. Moreover HR in Grameen phone doesn’t have enough manpower to take such load.

GP do not provide the facility of job sampling. A candidate may be good in all the testing procedures such as interviews, presentation, intelligences, etc. But the candidate may not be hard working, or the candidate’s performance may be not good in the field of job. So to get a practical knowledge on a candidate, the instructor provide a demo work environment and provide a load of job on the candidate to figure out how active the candidate is, how much stress he/ she can take. So this test is highly preferable. But they don’t provide such test because it’s too expensive and time killing.

The company accepts reference in the end of entire selection process. The reference is accepted on the selected employees who are qualified. But still references on International organization are always the 1st priority. Because they believe the candidates working standard is equivalent to the other developed western countries organization. Last of all, we had asked the executive whether they outsource any consultant for selecting the right employees and they told that it is highly confidential and they will not going to answer that. So our prediction says that they use some consultant to make the selection more successful.

Source:

Conclusion:

From above the discussion we have learned that not all the selection testing is used in Grameen Phone. Selection testing is taken according to the requirement of the job. Suppose, to select candidate for marketing segment, intelligence testing or caliber to interact with people is important but to select a candidate in engineering, testing should be analytical; testing should be on critical thinking. So the selection authority must have to understand what type of selection testing should be taken to make a proper selection. But still, selection testing procedure is not constant because of massive technological advancement and the change of working environment. In the earlier time, entire selection procedure were limited only in paper pencil but nowadays lot of things are included to justify the skills such as presentation skills, critical thinking, etc. Even in many software companies they take the candidates interview via Internet. So the procedure of selection is changeable.

Reference:

Human Resource Management- R. Wayne Mondy. SPHR

Human Resource Management- David A. Decenzo Stephen P Robbins
Human Resource Management- Raymond A Noe John R. Hollenbeck Barry Gerhart Patrick M Wright
Human Resource Management- Garry Dessler, International Edition)

Principle and Technique of Human Resource Management (2nd revised Edition)

HRM