A dating agency for job hunters!

Looking for a job on the web is set to get more like using a dating site as reliable psychometrics are used to sift candidates… Keep an eye on this stuff as it’s a growing trend! And my thanks to Angus McDonald for drawing my intention to this ere.net article:  www.bit.ly/x9QkBw

What are candidate assessment measures measuring?

Do candidates who are better at predicting what employers are looking for – who have a well-developed ’ability to identify criteria’ – actually do better at assessment events? Yes… in fact research seems to show that this ability correlates more strongly with job performance than assessment centre scores themselves!

Read this BPS Research Digest article for the full story: What exactly are candidate selection measures measuring?

How do you weigh an elephant without using a weighing machine?

Isn’t it refreshing to know that people are still being asked ridiculous interview questions. Follow this link to find some real crackers:

http://www.bnet.com/blog/business-research/the-25-weirdest-interview-questions-of-2010/520

And a couple of my personal favourites: ‘When was the last time you cried?’ and ‘Do you prefer cats or dogs?’ In the first one you are damned if you do and damned if you don’t. Admit to blubbing on a regular basis and you’ll be labelled as wet and over-sensitive, and of course if you don’t cry at all you’re just  a hard-nosed and uncaring sort of person. Cats or dogs? Well, it depends on which the interviewer prefers. Try and spot the pet hairs on his/her clothing and see if that provides a clue. Joking apart, I thought we had got over all this stuff – interview questions should relate directly, unambiguously and fairly to the job in question.

Picture credit: Tom Curtis/Freedigitalphotos.net

The Apprentice selection process

The new season of The Apprentice is now firmly established on BBC1. However wouldn’t it be interesting to put the ‘top entrepreneurs’ through a rigorous assessment process before the series, to see who has what it takes, and then compare the eventual winner with their assessment profile? In the meantime here’s how the candidates are selected

http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/clips/p00b9cdv/randoms_the_apprentice_selection_process/

(c) BBC 2011

Cats with thumbs

When I first went to University I studied Biology and I well remember being asked in some interview or other how you could breed a dog that could climb trees. Seriously. And in response I think I waffled on about the need for it to develop opposable thumbs or to grow claws like grappling hooks. I’m sure you get the idea. Anyhow this is a long winded way of introducing a great and funny advert about… cats with thumbs. Nothing to do with business, I just like it!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6CcxJQq1x8

Google job mania

You think you’ve got problems! Google recently received 75,000 job applications in a single week. OK, they reckon to have 6000 vacancies coming up, but that’s still heck of a number. Why the recruitment drive? They’ve decided to take on both Facebook and Apple. Not sure who my money would be on, but I’m surprised they didn’t apply their considerable brain power to designing a better recruitment process. This one was surely crying out for rigorous ‘self-selection’, right at the start.

Check out this Bloomberg article.

Do psychometric tests work?

Good question. What people usually mean when they ask if they work is: do tests predict anything useful about future work performance? The short answer is a resounding ‘yes’. As long as a test is used to measure an ability that is actually required of a particular job, then predictive validities are often in the 0.5-0.6 range. What this means is that at the top end of the scale, a test (the predictor) explains 36% ((0.6 x 0.6) x100) of the variance in the criterion – the criterion being something like a measure of productivity. By way of contrast other assessment methods such as the interview are often far less effective. A semi-structured interview would weigh in at 0.38 (14%) or thereabouts. And to get the whole thing in perspective, just in case you’re not impressed, in other fields such as the drug industry, predictive-type validities are often lower. For example, the association between Ibuprofen (the well-known anti-inflammatory) and pain reduction is in the region of 0.14 (2%) – see Robert Hogan’s article, details below.

Want to know more, here are some key references:

• Bertua, C., Anderson, N., and Salgado, J.F. (2005). The Predictive Validity of Cognitive Ability Tests: A UK Meta-Analysis. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 78(3), 387-410.
• Hogan, R. (2005). In Defense of Personality Measurement: New Wine in Old Whiners. Human Performance, 18, 331-341.
• Hunter, J.E, & Hunter, R.F. (1984). Validity and Utility of Alternative Predictors of Job Performance. Psychological Bulletin, 96, 72-98.
• Schmidt, F.L, & Hunter, J.E. (1998). The Validity and Utility of Selection Methods in Personnel Psychology: Practical Implications of 85 Years of Research Findings. Psychological Bulletin, 124, 262-274.

No work experience, no graduate job!

High Fliers Research conduct an annual survey of UK graduate job prospects. This year, whilst vacancies are set to rise, recruiters report that one-third of this year’s positions will be filled by graduates who they already know – either through work placements, internships or sponsorships. In addition two-thirds of employers say that graduates with no work experience at all are very unlikely to get through the selection process, and thus have little or no chance of receiving a job offer.

This is sobering stuff and highlights the need for all undergraduates to seek out placements or acquire meaningful work experience. It also means that many will need to work on their interview technique, and to practice psychometric and situational judgement tests (see my SJT post). All of these assessment methods are becoming increasingly popular for selecting placement students and interns.

Brains and a ‘winning’ personality? Now that would be dangerous!

If you were only allowed to look for one thing in a prospective manager, what would it be? Business psychology tells us that it should be ‘brains’, or rather general intelligence, or if you want to be precise, the ‘fluid’ bit of general intelligence. That’s the sort of intelligence that helps you to solve problems you haven’t come across before. Why? Of all the things we could assess, general intelligence – or having sufficient brain power – is the most predictive of work performance. Now if you could pick a second thing (this is getting a bit like the three wishes granted by a genie, I admit), what would that be? Again if we go with what’s most predictive we would have select ‘conscientiousness’ – the personality attribute that’s associated with self-organisation, discipline, thoroughness and a need to achieve. It also happens to be the best predictor across all types of work. And if a third choice was available? Then it would have to be emotional stability: being positive, calm and relaxed and able to take what comes your way.

Do I need to pick anything else? Obviously knowledge and previous experience come into the frame, and it might also be useful to have a sociable (extrovert) manager, and maybe one who was open to new ideas, who was concerned for others, and honest, with a touch of insight… Stop. Actually we’ve already got the top three and we’ve known what they are for at least the last 20 years.

However it’s not quite that simple. Here’s the thing: whilst general intelligence and conscientiousness are both predictive of success at work, they do not correlate with each other; indeed some people have found a negative relationship between the two. What’s going on?  As you can probably imagine this has been the subject of much debate. One of the ideas is that a negative relationship is due to fluid intelligence affecting the development of conscientiousness. This has the snappy title of ‘intelligence compensation theory’ and it goes like this: fluid intelligence, being innate, is the most likely to influence a growing personality; and to cut to the chase, what then happens is that those with less intelligence compensate by developing higher levels of conscientiousness – and vice versa for those with higher intelligence. Well, it ties in with the statistics, but as you can imagine it’s rather controversial. Mind you it does help to explain the bright individual who flies by the seat of their pants (low conscientiousness) and who nevertheless tends to get away with it.

But getting back to our prospective manager, perhaps there’s a less esoteric explanation. Conscientiousness is a mix of different attributes, which usually include dutifulness and deliberation on the one hand, and achievement orientation and competence on the other. Thus it’s likely that the dutiful plodder aspects of this personality factor are negatively associated with intelligence; and the achieving, competent, striving bits are positively associated. So could it just be that we’ve been looking at personality at the wrong level?

So here’s the punch line -  looking for general intelligence, consciousness and emotional stability is still good advice, but don’t be surprised if those with brains can look like riskier bets because they sometimes get lower overall conscientiousness scores. You’re going to have to dig deeper to find out who you’re really dealing with!

Note: If you’re worried about the other bit of general intelligence, the learnt or ‘crystallised’ aspect, there’s an ongoing argument about whether that is or isn’t related to conscientiousness, and in what combination (or not) with fluid intelligence. Let alone those that think intelligence is part of personality. I expect you get the idea.

Barrick, M.R. & Mount, M.K. (1991). The big five personality dimensions and job performance: A meta-analysis. Personnel Psychology, 44, 1-26.

Moutafi, J., Furnham, A. & Paltiel, L. (2004). Why is conscientiousness negatively correlated with intelligence? Personality and Individual Differences, 37(5), 1013-1022.

Schmidt, F.L. & Hunter, J.E. (1998). The validity and utility of selection methods in personnel psychology: Practical and theoretical implications of 85 years of research findings.  Psychological Bulletin, 124, 262-274.

Photo credit: Francesco Marino/FreeDigitalPhotos.net

The origins of the job interview

My attention was drawn to this Armstrong & Miller TV sketch a few days ago. If you have ever been interviewed (of course you have!), or attended an interview skills training course, this will make you chuckle:

http://youtu.be/b56eAUCTLok

Armstrong & Miller Show, Series 2, Episode 6, BBC1.