The Use of Testing in Selecting Employees - Essay Example

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Introduction: History of Employment Selection Tests

Employers often use various selection procedures to screen, hire, and promote candidates in vacant employment positions including medical tests, cognitive tests, criminal background checks, personality checks, and credit checks among others. Use of various tests provides effective means by which employers can select the most qualified employee for a job. Personnel testing started in the 1930s characterized by simple integrity and personality assessments introduced by the military (Wolf and Jenkins, 2006). However, the tests lost popularity during the era of the Civil Rights Movement from mid-20th century to the early 1970s. When the selection tests first started, there were few regulatory constraints on how organizations could use them to select suitable employment candidates, which led to the increase of discriminatory employment against minority races in the United States. However, changing attitudes caused by the rise of civil rights activists and increased court cases eroded the use of pre-employment tests until the 1980s when the government clarified legal issues surrounding their use in the recruitment process (Wolf and Jenkins, 2006).

Current Situation of Employment Selection Testing

By the time employment tests resumed full-time use in the human resource sector during the 1980s, the labor market had become global characterized by mergers and acquisitions, high unemployment rates, and a shortage of leaders to steer successfully organizations in a global economy. Firms started putting more emphasis on quick creative and critical thinking, as well as teamwork necessary to achieve organizational objectives in a highly diverse and dynamic work environment during recruitment. Personnel tests are essential to measure and predict the above employee attributes since they cannot be manifested in resumes and are not easily observable. Employment selection tests differ in what they aim to measure including work values, ability, and skills, as well as, predict including job performance and leadership potential (Walsh and Betz, 2001). Nonetheless, all selection tests available for use by employers are subject to legal and professional standards that oblige organizations to comply with employment laws and human resource guidelines. Testing as a human resource assessment tool has led to the development of dynamism in the human resource sector because recruitment, promotion, and termination have become complex processes requiring consulting experts in law and psychology to ensure procedures are carried out in the right way.

What Do Employment Selection Tests Measure?

Employment selection tests seek to identify and predict certain mental and physical characteristics related to the job at hand called constructs in a pool of applicants. Recruiters cannot see nor hear constructs, but they can observe their impact on other variables among a group of employment candidates. Differences in constructs have significant implications in the work environment, and they affect the way employees behave in a job and how they perform in their jobs. When attempting to predict employee performance during selection testing, the outcome being predicted is known as the criterion such as productivity, tenure, and leadership ability. When conducting a pre-employment test on a candidate, the recruiter assumes that the test is both valid and reliable enough to help in picking the right candidate.

Validity of Tests

An employment assessment tool is valid if it accurately measures and predicts the behavior desired by a recruiter. A test in the recruitment process acts as a representative of the candidate’s behavior. In testing, validity refers to the proof that the test is job-related, that is, scoring high in the test demonstrates that the candidate can perform the job well.

Reliability of Tests

Pre-employment tests must be reliable to be effective by providing consistent results when undertaken in similar circumstances such as when the same person takes the same test on different occasions. Tests could be unreliable pre-employment assessment tools for candidates because it is hard to present similar circumstances each time the test is taken. Obstacles to creating similar circumstances could be inclement weather or background noise caused by a nearby garage among other things.

Types of Pre-Employment Tests

Organizations in the United States use some common tests to determine the suitability of an employment candidate including achievement tests, mental and physical ability tests, group tests, personality tests, medical tests, as well as drug and alcohol tests (Walsh and Betz, 2001). Use of these tests requires proper knowledge and good judgment so that recruiters can make effective decisions related to the job(s) in question. Apart from achievement tests and physical ability tests, the rest of the tests mentioned above require experts who have specialized training and a vast experience to administer the tests and deduce the results correctly (Walsh and Betz, 2001). Besides, the instruments used for testing vary, which makes the requirements also to vary.

Mental and Physical Ability Tests

Such tests are usually administered to entry level candidates who lack professional training and experience since they measure capacity to learn and adapt easily to situations. The tests can be general or specific depending on the job at hand and include mathematical, verbal, and reasoning, abilities as well as written comprehension, reaction time, and motor ability respectively.

Achievement Tests

They measure a candidate’s knowledge and skills that are essential for the job in question. They are also known as proficiency tests and may involve knowledge tests for specific tasks and performance tests for simulated on job functions.

Personality Tests

Such tests, for testing honesty and integrity, were invented to replace polygraph tests used in private organizations that were prohibited in 1988. These tests measure a candidate’s attitude towards employee delinquency and involve asking employees to disclose past involvement in unlawful activities. Reference checks help in following up on these tests to ensure the recruiter does not engage in negligent hiring.

Group Tests

Recruiters may place candidates in groups without a leader and provide problems for teams to solve with mandatory participation of all members. These tests are usually effective in measuring leadership, interpersonal, and teamwork skills.

Medical Examinations

Medical tests are conducted to determine whether a candidate is psychologically and physically fit to perform required on job tasks adequately. They are also used to plan for employees’ medical plans and assess disability in candidates that may require special facilities.

Drug and alcohol tests are usually conducted on candidates to ensure they are ‘clean’ for certain jobs and prevent negative work outcomes associated with drug and alcohol abuse such as violence, absenteeism, workplace accidents, and job apathy.

Merits of Conducting Employee Selection Tests

Performance

The overall performance of an organization depends on the quality of employees’ performance, and the performance of managers depends on the performance of their subordinates. Therefore, selection tests are essential during recruitment to pick suitable candidates that are likely to perform well in the positions in which they are assigned (Dessler, 2014).

Benefit over Cost

The process of recruiting employees, training them, and supervising them is very costly since hiring and capacity building of an officer clerk may cost around $10,000 (Dessler, 2014). Therefore, finding the most appropriate candidate for the job would provide a return on the huge investment.

Legal Implications

An organization may face court trial if it engages in a negligent employment selection process that leads to the hiring of a dangerous person without proper safeguards when background checks are not conducted. For instance, negligent hiring may cause hiring a psychopathic employee without safety procedures to protect employees or a violent ex-convict who may assault other employees or customers on slight provocation. For instance in a court case involving Ponticas v. KMS Investments, a woman suffered assault at the hands of an apartment manager who possessed a pass key. The court found the apartments’ owner guilty of negligent hiring because he failed to conduct a proper background check on the employee during the recruitment process (Ryan and Lasek, 1991)

Demerits of Conducting Employment Selection Tests

Costs

Pre-employment testing is a costly process. To conduct valid and reliable tests, organizations may need to hire external experts to carry out detailed analyses of job functions and develop criteria from which to make quantitative inferences. The start-up cost is high as well as the event of making a wrong selection that does not increase the organization’s productivity.

Counterproductive

A significant segment of the American public fear tests, which may not necessarily mean that they are incompetent in their areas of expertise (Bell, Ryan, and Wiechmann, 2006). Consequently, the test may exclude the best candidate due to panic as opposed to helping in identifying him/her.

Over-reliance

The popularity of pre-employment tests in the human resource practice has placed too much emphasis on the tests at the expense of other equally effective employment assessment tools such as interviews and assessment centers. The conviction among employers that tests are always valid and reliable because of their objectivity may be overrated. Getting higher scores in the tests increases the likelihood of the candidate making a better employee but getting a lower score does not mean the candidate will make an ineffective employee (Bell, Ryan, and Wiechmann, 2006). Therefore, tests should be used in addition to other assessment tools to obtain the best-rounded candidate.

Legal Implications

Employment selection tests may cause legal trouble for an employer if the criteria intentionally or unintentionally have an adverse consequence on American minority groups by indicating that there were unfair practices aimed at isolating such groups. The organization may face litigation for discrimination that is expensive due to monetary compensation and negative publicity. For instance, the case of EEOC v. Ford Motor Co. in 1991 involved a court-sanctioned settlement of $8.55 million in compensation for African American applicants. They faced adverse impact on a cognitive test known as Apprenticeship Training Selection System used to evaluate mechanical aptitude by measuring numerical, verbal, and spatial reasoning in candidates. Consequently, the company established less discriminatory tests to include all American populations.

Contemporary Issues in Pre-Employment Tests

Legal Issues

In the United States, laws exist prohibiting discrimination in employment based on gender, religion, race, age (above 40 years), and disability including the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) of 1967 and Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) 1990. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) offers guidelines for pre-employment tests to comply with the laws and avoid adverse impact on minority populations. The EEOC also investigates an organization when an employment candidate or employee accuses the employer of violating the laws (Wolf and Jenkins, 2006).

Testing for Assignments Abroad

The job market has become increasingly global like other sectors of the economy forcing people to leave their families and cross borders to work in culturally different locations. Such occasions require the use of special tests such as the Global Competency Inventory to assess whether a candidate will perform well in a foreign work environment (Dessler, 2014).

Some tests mentioned above probe employees for personal information, some of which may cause devastating impact to a candidate if released to the public. Consequently, employers must store human resource files securely to prevent litigation based on defamation or ethical audit based on the intrusion of privacy (Ryan and Lasek, 1991).