Coming soon · Book Profile
Personnel Selection in Organizations
A frontier-of-the-field volume in which leading industrial-organizational psychologists reframe personnel selection as an integrated, construct-driven, theory-based enterprise spanning job analysis, performance modeling, prediction, validation, fairness, utility, and the changing world of work.
A profile of this book is on the way.
What it’s about
Personnel Selection in Organizations gathers sixteen original chapters by leading scholars to move the science and practice of employee selection beyond dust-bowl empiricism toward a coherent, theory-driven model. It reconceives job analysis and content validity as construct-linkage problems, offers an explicit theory of individual job performance, expands the criterion domain to include contextual (citizenship, prosocial) performance, scrutinizes predictor constructs (interviews, personality, biodata, assessment centers, computerized tests), and treats validity as a unitary process of building inferential linkages between predictor and performance constructs. It also confronts the human and organizational context—fairness and legal pressures, applicant reactions and gaming, the economic utility of selection, selection OUT (firings, layoffs, retirement), small-sample settings, changing demographics, and staffing as competitive strategy. Together the chapters argue that better selection requires understanding WHY procedures work, not merely THAT they work.
The through-line
- Who it’s for
- An industrial-organizational psychologist, HR researcher, or advanced student who wants to make scientifically defensible, effective, and fair personnel decisions that improve organizational performance.
- The problem
- Traditional selection practices—narrow job analysis, blind criterion-related validation, single-criterion prediction—no longer suffice for competitive, changing, diverse organizations. They feel torn between the demands of rigorous science, practical accountability to stakeholders, and mounting legal and social pressures, unsure how to justify why their selection systems work.
- The plan
- Reconceive job analysis and content validity as construct-linkage problems.
- Adopt an explicit theory of job performance and expand the criterion domain to contextual performance.
- Understand the constructs measured by predictors (interviews, personality, biodata, assessment centers, computerized tests).
- Treat validation as building inferential linkages supported by multiple evidence sources.
- Attend to fairness, applicant reactions, and utility as integral parts of the system.
- The payoff
- Selection systems that predict and explain performance, are legally defensible, and are perceived as fair. · A cumulative, theory-based science of selection that informs practice across contexts. · Organizations that use human resources strategically to gain competitive advantage.
See our guide
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Additional reading
- Design, Implementation and Evaluation of Assessment and Development Centres; Best practice guidelines · British Psychological Society (BPS)
Cited by the author as an authoritative source for best practice, covering key issues like fairness, design, and evaluation that are central to the book's guidance.
- Assessment Centres (3rd edn) · C Woodruffe
Recommended for readers seeking a broader overview and history of the assessment centre method.
- The big five personality dimensions and job-performance; a meta-analysis · Barrick, M R and Mount, K M
Provides the empirical support for the book's caution against over-relying on personality tests in selection, a key topic in Chapter 5.
- A theory of the validity of predictors in selection · M Smith
Offers a theoretical framework for understanding why different selection tools have varying levels of effectiveness, underpinning the book's core argument.
- Competence at Work · Spencer, L M and Spencer, S M
A foundational text on the concept of competence, relevant to Chapter 2 on developing a competence framework.
- Development and Assessment Centres · Charles Woodruffe
Cited as a key text for readers wanting a more recent and in-depth exposition of assessment centre work, a core topic of the book.
- Performance Management: The new realities · Michael Armstrong and Angela Baron
The book uses Armstrong and Baron's definition of performance management as its foundation, making their work a primary source for understanding this core concept.
- The Competent Manager: A model for effective performance · R. F. Boyatzis
The author attributes the current usage and definition of 'competency' to Boyatzis, making this a foundational text for a central theme of the book.
- Appraisal and Feedback: Making performance review work · Clive Fletcher
Fletcher is cited as an authority on appraisals, a key one-to-one interaction within performance management, providing deeper insight into this specific practice.
- The Easy Guide to Repertory Grids · D. Jankowicz
The book presents the repertory grid as a powerful technique for developing interview models; this book is recommended as a highly accessible introduction to the method.